


So long, sailing

by purplebard



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disordered Eating, Doomed Timelines, Emetophobia, F/M, Flashbacks, Illustrated, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Medical Procedures, POV Second Person, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-04-17 12:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 51
Words: 201,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4666374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplebard/pseuds/purplebard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When your brother dies one day into a three-year journey, the only way to go is up. [Davesprite does not survive the events of [S]GAME OVER and stays on the battleship with Jade post-retcon.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Prospitian Royal Navy Ship _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W. § date 13 April, 2009

 

      You are Jade Harley. Fifteen minutes ago, you became one of the most powerful beings that ever has or will exist. And twenty- _five_ minutes ago, you and your friends won the game for which you have spent most of your life preparing. Well, not really, but almost. At the moment, it's more as though you've pressed the biggest pause button of all time. You have two of your best friends with you (your best _best_ friend having become inseparably ingrained into your DNA), five planets to explore at your leisure, and what feels like all the time in the world. There are a lot of words you could use to describe how you feel in this moment. Among them would be “excited,” “accomplished,” “tired,” and “downright terrified.”

      The first thing that occurs to you is how strange it is to have more than one warm, breathing, _alive_ human talking to you at once. Okay, two of them are arguably undead and have bodies that disappear halfway down into semi-solid ghost tails. And yes, you _did_ get to talk to one living human in the past few hours. But this is overkill. Your new dog ears swivel every which way, picking up snippets of a hundred conversations buzzing simultaneously. You scarcely register a single word.

      Inside the battleship corridors, a river of pushing, shoving bodies is making its way around its new home. Prospit was never this claustrophobic – pedestrian traffic was mild at most, allowing you to nod and smile at just about everyone you drifted past. This must be what they call “high foot traffic.” The clacking of hard carapaced feet and the wet pitter-pattering of amphibian toes thunks and echoes on the steel floors of the ship. You flinch at every shoulder that brushes past, and each consort that dashes under your feet elicits a sound from you comparable to a puppy having its paw stepped on. It isn't until your anxiety reaches a fever pitch that you realize your brother has been talking to you for the past couple minutes. He yanks on a loose curl of hair that spirals out of your godhood to get your attention, and you start to snarl. Focusing on John's face, the din fades in your four ears.

 

      “Hell- _o_. Have you been listening?”

      You blink. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”

      He sighs. Perhaps his title as the Heir of Breath makes the exhale more dramatic; you could almost swear you see a cartoonish puff of air leave his mouth.

      “I thought not.”

      “Man, I told you already that she was checked out for the day,” says a voice behind you. His speech is rough, birdlike in its rasp and eerily similar to the voice of another you heard earlier today. A taloned finger flicks the back of your head.

      You whip your head around and stick your tongue out at Davesprite, whose expression is all but indiscernible behind his sunglasses. The smile tugging one corner of his mouth upward is so small that you wonder if you're imagining it.

      “ _Any_ way,” John continues, shooting a glare behind you. “I was trying to say that we should zap some furniture from our houses onto the ship. It would be neat to have some sort of living room going on. Like revamping the ship into one big house.”

      You clap your hands together. “Oh! Yes, of course.” A billion different angles of your three houses flash behind your eyelids. Scanning your own home, you feel your Bec-ears flatten. “Ah, but I suppose I don't have that much to contribute now that _someone_ launched almost all of my foyer into space.” A faint vertigo settles over you when you open your eyes – a side effect of semipotence.

      John snorts. “I don't take responsibility for shenanigans that happen when I sleep.”

      “Do you take responsibility for wrecking my atrium, then?”

      “Jade, sacrifices must be made sometimes for the greater good. Besides, I'm not sure any of us want you to put mummies with deer heads in a room that is supposed to make you feel relaxed.”

      “ _What,_ ” Davesprite mutters behind you.

      “Jade's got some wacky stuff in her house,” explains John. “Or, she did.”

      “Well shit, didn't that go without saying.”

      “Right?”

      “You two are getting no living room at all if you keep this up! Geez, and it's only been a few minutes.” But you get the feeling he's already tuned you out.

      “Just let me scope out a good room to use....”

 

      John floats up and drifts ahead of the crowd, gliding just above dozens of heads with his bright blue windsock trailing behind him. Davesprite works his way into the space John leaves. A stout Dersite bumps into the back of his wing and falls back with a loud “Oof!”

      You glance around him at his injured wing, or lack thereof. The feathers are frayed at the end, crusted and clumped up with half-dried blood. He looks unfazed, and maybe he is, but it still looks nasty.

      “Don't let me forget to patch that wing up later,” you chide. Davesprite looks surprised.

      “You don't have to. I'm not completely organic anymore. It'll just regenerate.”

      “And how long will that take?”

      Davesprite rubs his arms. “It's not like I have an internal countdown. But it –”

      “No buts! That wing's getting proper medical attention!” You punch your palm with enthusiasm. “Oh, and that too,” you add, pointing at the loose bandages around his stomach.

      “If you say so.”

      The two of you follow John in silence. Your mind begins to wander until Davesprite starts again.

      “That was some stunt you pulled back there,” he ventures. His words are low and halting, as though each was evaluated carefully before saying them aloud. It takes a moment for you to even comprehend what he means. When you glance down at his hands you can see that he's flexing them, fingers disappearing and reappearing at an even, agitated pace.

     “If dying in an explosion and being dumped onto a quest bed post mortem by a homicidal chess dog can be considered a stunt, then yes, it was,” you tease. Davesprite doesn't smile. He doesn't even look at you. You shiver.

      “I'm sorry that I left so suddenly. Time was running short.” Your eyes lower, watching your ruby slippers follow the path that John carves ahead.

      “Yeah, I kind of expected more than a 'be right back,' but that's just how the cookie crumbles, I guess.”

      “Are you angry with me?”

      Davesprite's mouth opens slightly, and the whites of his wide eyes are just barely visible through his shades. “What? No, I... fuck. Sorry. You probably don't want to talk to me right now, I'm kinda....” he trails off, grasping at an elusive last word with a trembling hand.

      “Why would I not want to talk to you?”

      It's an innocent question, but it only irritates him further. The feathers of his good wing fluff up a bit, and at first it appears that he won't answer at all. The hallway you turn into is less populated, and John continues to drift ahead of you, poking open doors and peering inside.

      “Do you remember?” he asks suddenly. A hurried question, like spitting out a bad taste.

      “Remember what?”

      A muscle twitches in Davesprite's clamped jaw, and you feel clumsy. It seems that your every response is somehow a disappointment to him. This isn't how a regular conversation between friends sounded in your head.

      “Nevermind.”

      “No, what is it?”

      He looks up and turns slightly, as though the direct sight of you will burn his eyes. “Do you remember being her?” The missing name hangs between you. _Oh_. Your brow furrows, and as you continue to look at him, a memory broils within something that feels separate from your own consciousness. A cheek itching with dried tears, a broken sword, an impossibly bright and burning sun, a chessboard stained with golden blood–

      “Hey, what about this room?”

      You're lurched into the present by John, who sets his feet back on the ground and points at a door in the middle of the hall.

      “Hold on!” You quicken your pace, leaving Davesprite and his memories behind you.

 

      John is already inside by the time you catch up. The room is dim, lit only by the green that filters in from two porthole windows. You fiddle with the box of switches installed next to the steel paneling. Two of them cause nothing but a concerning clunk and a spark, but after a moment you line them up correctly and the lights flicker on. You both blink in the sudden barrage of bright yellow. The fluorescents hiss.

      “It's not that big, but it looks like nobody was using it before. We'll just have to get rid of... whatever that shit is,” says John, motioning at what looks like a few overturned crates of grain. White Prospitian shipping labels peel off of the sides.

      “I'll trust your judgment, since _I_ apparently have no idea what a normal living room should look like,” you reply, placing your hands on your hips. Something churns at the heart of the hull, and the floor vibrates with mechanical whirring.

      “What the fuck is that?” asks Davesprite from the doorway. You yelp and clutch the front of your godhood. He flinches at your reaction. “Sorry. I guess I'm in permanent stealth mode,” he adds, pointing a claw at his tail.

      “...It's fine. And that is the sound of the boiler room. It just means that the battleship is starting back up.”

      “Is that normal? I mean, it was crashed, wasn't it.”

      You amble across the room and run your finger along a bronze portal frame. Streaks of rust fall from some of the bolts. “Not exactly. The crew just abandoned it. It's filled to the brim with carapacians now, so they're turning a bunch of functions back on. I don't think they understand that we don't need all the mechanical bits intact to maintain flight.”

      John cocks his head. “What is a carapacian? Are those what the little chess people are called?”

      “Yup! The scientific name, that is.”

      “How did you find that out,” asks Davesprite. He asks his questions in a near monotone, more like statements than anything.

      “You learn a lot of things when you wake up early. Maybe if you had decided to wake up before the game started, _you_ would know too.” You wink, and Davesprite looks away.

      John folds his arms. “If you're done grilling us for not knowing chess alien trivia, I'd like to start setting some furniture in here.”

      You answer him with jazz hands, fingers glowing with energy courtesy of the Green Sun. “Ready when you are!”

 

      Your evening consists of questionable decisions in interior design. The living room that your team whips up consists of a fridge, two couches of wildly different style, a number of strange posters by Davesprite's request that you only grudgingly accepted, and the few world globes that you could stand to move from their positions in your grandpa's office. The affair takes almost an hour, drawn out by several bickering sessions between John and Davesprite and the need that you feel to poke fun at each others increasingly random furniture demands.

      The only thing you keep your mouth shut about is the harlequin figure John asks for, which you warp onto a side table. For a moment he seems to forget that you and Davesprite are there. He turns the figure slowly in his hand, and his face is less sad than it is simply confused about how he ended up here, as if he expects to wake up somewhere else at any moment. The grief that you've willed yourself to bury resurfaces. You feel ill.

 

      A knock comes from the open door, and the three of you start. Nannasprite floats in the doorway. Or just “Nanna,” you suppose – it isn't as if there's another version of her that requires a suffix for differentiation. John exhales and sets the harlequin next to a lamp. His fingers shake slightly when he pulls his hand away.

      Nanna's disembodied hand is balled into a fist that rests on her hip. She's a comical sight, but you think she makes the undead clown look seem charming. “Who wants to be the first to tell me when the last time they've eaten was?”

      “Uh....” You count hours backwards in your head. When _did_ you eat last? This morning? Last night? You can't even remember when you entered the session. The computers in your inventory disagree on whether it is 10:20, 10:22, or 10:17 P.M.

      Nanna points an accusatory finger at John. “I know it's been at least several hours for _you_ , young man.”

      John adopts a look that resembles a man waiting for the jury's sentence. “Really, Nanna, it's been a long day. You don't have to –”

      “What? Make sure my children don't starve?” Nanna glances at Davesprite over the rims of her glasses. “You too, dear.”

      “Thanks.”

       A glance into the ships kitchen tells you that Nanna has already made it her domain. Boxes and bowls of ingredients conquer the counters, and several plates of food are waiting on a table lined with stools. A group of crestfallen Prospitians peer into the window on the kitchen door, which Nanna has evidently locked behind her.

      “How did you manage to make so much already?” you ask. “This ship has very limited rations!”

      Nanna winks at you with her slashed eye, hooting with conspiratory laughter. “I have my ways.” She snaps her fingers and turns to leave. “Well, you kids had better follow me! Dinner won't stay hot forever.”

      When she disappears, John takes a deep breath. “If there is even a single cake in that kitchen, I will lose my fucking mind.”

 

      You thought that you'd consumed enough media to understand how most families eat dinner together. The reality is much more chaotic than you could have ever imagined, but you suppose that this isn't a normal family dinner after all.

      It starts when you tell Nanna that you're vegan.

      “You're what, dear?” Nanna asks with a tight smile. She hasn't registered your words yet.

      “I mean, not by choice or anything! But it's very hard to keep animal products on my island. Or, um... it was. It took a long time for mail to reach me, so it was impractical to have food that was so perishable.” You find yourself babbling, hyperaware of the three sets of confused eyes on you. “I pretty much only ate fruits and vegetables. Oh, and I know how to make bread! So there's that, too.”

     Nanna inhales slowly. She pauses over the sink across from the table, ghost hand trembling.

      “...Nanna? Are you okay?” John asks.

      Davesprite leans over from his spot a couple stools over. “You really dropped the bomb on her,” he whispers. “You gotta be the one to call Life Alert when she has a stroke now.” Your ears swivel back, confused.

      “It's not even that big of a deal. Also, why are we whispering?” you whisper.

  
      Nanna whips around and slams her hand on the table. Your utensils bounce. “How can you even lift a fork?” she cries. She looks genuinely distressed, one eye twitching. You scramble to hold up your fork as evidence that you are not on the brink of collapse.

      “I'm fine! Really, I didn't mean anything by it, it just occurred to me that I haven't –“

      Nanna scoops your plate out from under you and returns to the counter. Now you're really disappointed – a side effect of your ascension means that you have a new craving for meat. When you first sat down it took everything in you not to hold your head back and shovel the whole chicken leg into your mouth. You slouch forward and rest your cheek in your hand.

      “I can't believe this,” Nanna mutters to herself from across the kitchen. “I cannot be- _lieve_ this at all.” She scoops what seems like triple the food you already had onto your plate.

      You elbow John in the ribs. “Can you please call her off?”

      “Nope,” he replies. As Nanna continues her rant under her breath, John and Davesprite have ignored your plight and started eating. “She's relentless with this sort of thing. You should have seen my kitchen. _Full_ of cookies. I don't even know how she made so many. The imps ate them all, though.”

      “ _Ugh_. I'm pretty sure I've gone longer than you without eating today."

      “The last thing I ate was the end piece of bread that I found under my kitchen sink two days ago,” says Davesprite from the end of the table. “Well, from my perspective,” he adds.

      “Dude, shut up. I'm pretty sure you don't even need to eat now.”

      “Just sayin'.”

      What Nanna pushes in front of you can only be described as an obscene amount of food. A mound of mashed potatoes rises five inches off the plate. “No one can tell me that I don't feed my kids,” Nanna declares, puffing her chest out.

      “No one was saying that before, Nanna. We know,” John says.

      Nanna wags a blue finger at him. “That is fresh coming from someone who didn't live on grass their whole life!”

      “I didn't... eat grass....”

      “You haven’t got all day!" Nanna barks, whipping her head back toward you. “There's years of damage to reverse!” She doesn't turn her threatening eye away until you've made a show of eating faster than is recommended.

      Satisfied, Nanna drifts off to unlock the door and let in a flurry of carapacians who have been pining in the hall. The first to dash in is Jaspers. He creeps along the floor, stomach low like a cat who who has forgotten he's as big as a human.

      “Oh man, did we have to let the fucking cat in here,” Davesprite complains. He rises out of his stool and perches on the tabletop. Jaspers glides underneath the table, snaking between the poles of your seats. His purrs echo loudly underneath the metal. You recoil and pull your feet up when one of his tentacle arms brushes your ankle.

      “Purr purr purr. What's all this?” Jaspers pokes his head up beside John and paws at the edge of the plate. His princess hat bobbles. “Can I have some?”

      “Argh! No, kitty!” John lifts his plate above his head and gives you a look. “Doesn't Rose's house have cat food in it or something?”

      You sweep the Lalonde's house. A closet off the side of the kitchen contains nothing but a few half-empty bottles of bleach, a vacuum, and a martini glass lying on its side. “Doesn't seem like it. We'll have to alchemize some later.”

      “I could have told you that!” Jaspers purrs. “I have been dead for a very long time after all! Purr purr purr.” His voice is like a toddler's, all squeaks and poor enunciation. His eldritch whiskers twitch.

      “Well, go get Nanna and she'll give you something to eat,” John says, shooing Jaspers away. “And stop saying 'purr' out loud. We get it, you're a cat.” Across the kitchen, Nanna doles out food to a growing crowd of chess people. On the floor beside her, two pink turtles nip at the residue inside a mixing bowl.

      “Oh, there's too many people John! I didn't spend time with very many people when I was an alive cat. It makes me feel nervous,” Jaspers meows. He leaps onto the table and curls his sprite tail into a spiral. Davesprite squawks and dodges under the table. Your ears flatten, and a rumble starts in your throat.

      “What's the matter with you?” John asks. It's louder in here now, and you have to raise your voices to be heard. You don't know how to tell him that something about Jaspers is suddenly so infuriating. Jaspers seems to sense it. He looks up from washing his ears and hisses loudly in your face. Davesprite bumps his head under the table and curses. You bare your teeth in response, growls rumbling in both of your throats.

      “Jaspers!” John scolds. He stands up and claps his hands at the oversized house cat. Jaspers flinches and spits, swiveling his ears back. “Very rude! Go on, get – you're going to shed on the food.”

      “ _Hissss_.” Jaspers jumps onto the floor between you and John, and a few cat hairs fly off of him. One of them lands on your lips, and you swat it away.

      Davesprite still has his back to you underneath the table. He looks frantically in both directions. “Is he gone?” he asks.

      Jaspers paws past his hiding spot and sniffs the ends of his severed wing. The graze of his nose tips Davesprite off, and he bashes his head against the bottom of the table again. “Fuck!”

      You growl and kick one leg out. It catches Jaspers in the shoulder, which sends him flying off with another guttural spit. Davesprite pokes his head out and scrabbles back into his seat. A single feather drifts from his hair when he runs his hand through it. “So I'm just gonna pretend that never happened.”

      “I don't know how I'm gonna survive for three years with you furries,” John says.

      “Don't blame us! Jaspers is the instigator.”

      “Yeah, cats are assholes,” Davesprite mumbles. “Ain't our fault he wants to be a homewrecker.”

      “Yeah, yeah, blame an innocent creature for your own weird behavior,” John replies. He picks up his empty plate and starts to stand.

      “I'll get the whole dog thing under control eventually,” you sniff.

      “There's nothing to get 'under control' for me, I'm the fucking prey animal here,” Davesprite groans. “Someone needs to put kitty in the kennel. I can't live like this, I have at least one sliver of dignity left to maintain.”

      Your eyes flash. “I could banish him to LOLAR.”

      “You could lock him in Cetus' swamp. Make him be her feline man-servant,” agrees Davesprite. He rubs his hands together.

      “It's only been a couple of hours and you're plotting an animal's demise. Do you hear yourselves?” sighs John. “I'm sure Rose would love that you're trying to re-murder her cat.”

      “She doesn't have to know,” Davesprite whispers from behind steepled fingers. You bite back a laugh. “Cat? What cat. I'm one hundred percent certain you never had a dear departed pet brought back as a princess ghost. In fact, you never had a sprite at all. Nothing happened to him, nope, definitely not.”

     “All right, well, I'm out for the night.” John yawns. “Anyone else want to stake out the bedrooms?”

 

      A wing of the battleship is filled with bunkers, designed for two to three soldiers each. Half of the quarters are wholly unused – the crew of this ship was sparse. Perhaps, you theorize, this is why they were so eager to flee when the tide of the war fell to Derse.

      “I think I'll wait until tomorrow to go home,” John sighs, looking over his claimed bedroom. You've helped him split up the bunk beds, and he's pushed them together for himself, spreading a single yellow bed sheet over them both. The thin fabric had made a stiff, starchy sound when they were unfolded. “Most of my house is covered in oil. I'll just try to salvage whatever I can from my room, and then this place will look less like a jail cell.”

      Intuition tells you that he'll probably only spend a fraction of his time at home cleaning up old possessions. Despite his jokes and his teasing tonight, a tired grief continues to flicker in his face that you recognize from his years of troubled dreams. You make a mental note not to watch him when he goes to LOWAS – you won't bother him until he's ready to leave.

      “Just message me whenever you wake up, and I'll send you to LOWAS,” you promise, stretching your arms behind your head.

      “If you're awake, that is.”

      “I have a feeling I won't be sleeping as often now that Prospit is....”

      “...Yeah.”

      A quiet nestles itself between you, and John's gaze wanders to the porthole window across the hall. Sadness creeps back up on you, latching onto your shoulders and holding you down.

      “Do you think playing the game was worth it?” John asks.

      You don't know what to say.

      “I mean, we all got to meet. Well, most of us met most of us. That was pretty awesome. And I guess we got some cool powers out of it.” He turns his hand over, forming a tiny tornado in his palm that he squashes with his fingers. “But was it worth everything else?”

      You look down at your shoes and exhale through your nostrils. Your loss feels a different breed than John's – your guardian is long gone, and he knows it. You lost a nice ocean view, sure, and you can tell you're going to miss Bec unbearably sooner or later. But at least he's part of you, lending you an incredible power that is currently allowing you and your friends to live through to the next session. Prospit's destruction feels like your greatest loss. You won't ever regain the freedom you felt on that golden moon – the unshakable certainty that somehow you knew all that would come to pass. Now you don't know anything. Your future is invisible to the oracle clouds. But how do you compare that to the death of a father?

      “I'm never going to see him again, am I,” John murmurs. “He won't even appear in the bubbles.”

      You swallow the lump in your throat. “No. I'm sorry.”

      “I didn't think so.” He shifts his weight and looks at you. It's as though he's seeing you clearly for the first time. “Jade?”

      “Yes, John?”

      “I was thinking this earlier, but you know, we really look alike.”

      A smile tugs at your mouth. “Do you think so?” You think it would ruin the moment if you mentioned how many times you've been to his dream tower when you were younger, comparing his face to yours. When you were seven, you pried one of his eyelids open to see if the color was the same as yours. You were terribly disappointed when they turned out to be a dark, vivid blue.

     “Yeah. Not that we're identical, but....”

     You laugh. “I think we're identical only in timing. The rest is just random rearranging of genes.”

     John brightens. “Man, we are total freaks of nature.”

      “Totally! Weirdo slime babies.”

      He laughs openly, and it lifts some of the weight off of you. “That's another good thing about the game, I guess. I got to find out I have a cool sister.”

      Affection washes over you. The words evade you – how amazing it is for him to know that he is your brother, that Skaia has bound you together so. “And I'm glad I have a complete dork of a brother,” you retort, softly shoving his shoulder.  
  
      Someday you will figure out how to tell him how much this means to you, but it is only the first night and you are so, so tired. Teasing him will do for now.

 

      A salamander in tiny black robes patters around the corner. Its striped purple and pink scarf whispers along the floor. You vaguely recognize it from... where? Your Spectagoggles? John recognizes the consort immediately.

      “Casey! I was wondering where you ran off to,” he coos, scooping the salamander into his arms. It rests its webbed yellow hands on his godhood and pops a bubble in his face.

      “Did you adopt a consort?” you ask, covering your smile with one hand.

      “Hell yes I did. This is Casey. She is my beautiful and talented daughter.”

      “I'm not sure you're supposed to remove the consorts from their villages. Doesn't she have salamander parents?”

      “Jade, please. I will stand to hear no criticism of my family. We are non-nuclear but we make it work.”

      “I believe you, John.”

      “Isn't that right, Casey?”

      Casey makes a throaty noise resembling a glub.

      “Casey says 'yes.'”

      You yawn. “All right, Casey. I hate to bail on you two so quickly, but I would like to get back to my own room now.”

      Casey scrambles out of John's arms and readjusts herself on his shoulder.

      “I think she forgives you, but that is just my loose translation,” John says. “Goodnight, Jade.”

      “Goodnight, John.”

 

      Your eyes burn with exhaustion, and yet you still can't fall asleep for the life of you. You've already teleported what remains of your room into this bunker – tiny potted succulents line the porthole frame, and a number of spoils from your alchemization session are sticking out of your meager closet. In the dark you can start to discern the designs on the few posters you've had the energy to hang. And above your head, the five planets of your session revolve in silence. Their denizens sleep within, coiled up and whispering in their dreams.

      Occasionally there is the sound of someone walking past the door, but otherwise the battleship is silent. You start to close your eyes, but then your phone pings beside your head.

      It takes you a moment to pick it up. You squint at the new message, fuzzy without your glasses until you hold it away from your face.

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 23:55 --

EB: oh!

EB: also, jade, i forgot to say something before.

GG: what?

EB: thanks for saving our asses from the scratch.

EB: even if it is going to take three years. :P

GG: :)

GG: youre welcome

GG: goodnight!!! <3

EB: goodnight.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 23:58 –-

 

     You turn up your phone volume to its loudest setting in case John pesters you again in the morning. Then you click the screen off and roll over, burrowing your face into your pillow. Something deep inside of you continues to whir despite your heavy eyelids, and you feel it keeping the ship adrift. The pillowcase smells like ocean spray, salty and clean. You will yourself to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (eating a rice krispie treat very loudly) its all downhill from here folks, welcome to hell


	2. Chapter 2

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 14 April, 2009 

 

     You are Dave Strider, alternatively known as Davesprite. You are half human, half crow, half billions of lines of code. The scientific name for you is “feathery douche.” After spending four months in a timeline doomed to whither away (or one year? Time travel fogs your sense of how real time passes), you went back in time and resurrected yourself as a bird in order to prevent the deaths of two of your friends. Now you have dinosaur arms, feathers funking up your hair, and an excruciating need for birdseed. You've helped your friends along their journeys, finished your gig as a spirit guide, and now your alpha timeline equivalent is a god. There's nothing left for you to do now but chill out for two years and three hundred sixty-four days. That, and figure out how the hell you're relevant to anything anymore.

 

      Although you would never admit it to anyone, seeing John and Jade nearly made you do a mid-air backflip with joy. First you're floating on Skaia, freshly alone again with a giant face in the sky before everything went black (thanks for captchaloging the whole damn planet, Jade). Then there they were – together, alive, and right in front of your face. Them, and a whole bunch of aliens and amphibians. You couldn't help your chest from swelling with pride in that moment, even if everything John says to you makes you want to deck him with your scratchy, plated crow fists. You suppose it's too late to make a good impression – how could you? But being responsible for their staying alive works for you.

      Last night you refused to let Jade fetch anything from your apartment for your new bedroom on the battleship. Instead you opted to find a secluded bunker a few twists and turns away from the hall John and Jade picked, throwing your paper-thin blankets into a nest-like pile on one of the beds and curling up unceremoniously. And no, the nest part wasn't a coincidence – as much as it pains you to acknowledge, you are catching wind of some major bird habits. You wonder fleetingly if this is karmic retribution for all the times you made fun of Jade for being a furry. The only thing you did to get ready for bed was remove your sunglasses and finally tear off your sprite pendant – it's dangling from the porthole frame now, grooves still caked with dark blood.

      You didn't know how to explain to Jade why you don't feel entitled to anything in that apartment, or how the sight of anything in your room might send you into a flurry of panic. For months you spent ninety percent of your miserable time in there, soaking your bed sheets with sweat from the unbearable heat of LOHAC and beating Calsprite away from your stuff with sheathed swords. Only the other ten percent was spent on Derse, making game plans for the past and enjoying the only place where it didn't feel like your skin was melting off of you. Rose spent the timeline reserved and terse. That is, when she wasn't wasted. You had a feeling that if she admitted to herself that your friends were unquestionably dead, she would have thrown herself into the rainbow sea. Visits to LOLAR were politely declined, and you definitely didn't want her to see how fucked your living situation was on the Planet of Lava and Despair. Setting foot on LOWAS was out of the question. Thus you spent days at a time alone, pushing arduously through your dead-end quest and sweating off half your weight.

      So you don't want anything from your fucking bedroom on this ship.

 

      You wake up today in near silence, and the sheer absence of sound unsettles you. It you hadn't spent four months (or a year) waking up to the all-encompassing grind of giant steel gears and pouring lava waterfalls, you would wake up surprised at the lack of traffic outside. You might have expected to see a crow or two on the windowsill, cawing as if to say “late for school again, asshole.” You might have expected to hear honking cars, sighing buses, and your downstairs neighbor yelling on the phone next to their open window. But you wake up to nothing but scattered conversations in the hall outside, and the gentle mechanical vibrating of the boilers under the metal plates of the floor.

      The corporeal part of you groans with agony when you sit up. You slept on your stomach to spare the wing, but your torso wound still aches. It's easy for you to conceal it; no one looking at you would be able to tell that you feel like you've been hit with a train. And your bro isn't here to tell you to walk it the hell off, I didn't even hit you that hard. But damned if you don't feel shitty right now, and you have no idea how to deal with it. You remember Jade scolding you the night before, and her promise to patch you up. The idea of her tending to your wounds fills you with anxiety and embarrassment. Would she even use her hands, or would she orchestrate it all from across the room, directing a series of floating needles and bandages and scissors around you in circles? You almost hope she does the latter; if she touches you, you might just jump out of what's left of your skin. You feel stiff with dried blood.

      You click your phone on. It's 9:36 A.M. You're impressed with yourself – you didn't fall asleep until four. For hours you lay awake trying to adjust and kick your legs, flinching each time you remembered you didn't have them anymore. You'll miss running eventually. You can't say you're hungry (John's right, you don't need to eat, even if it feels nice to maintain human habits), but you decide to get up anyway. When you float out of bed, you leave a pile of bloody feathers in your crumpled sheets.

 

      Opening the door into the light, you are immediately pissed off that Jade didn't choose a Dersite hull instead. Like, of course she had to pick a Prospitian one. But the yellow that floods your field of vision makes you squint irritably and mash your sunglasses back on. The clicking footsteps of a few carapacians echo as they walk away from your room. The hall is empty.

      The layout of the battleship is confusing – everything looks the same, and barely anything is labeled. You thought you knew how far away John and Jade's rooms were, and you could probably make it to the new living room unattended. You thought. As it turns out, you get lost immediately. You end up weaving through the perimeter of the floor until you come full circle outside the open door of the living room.

 

     “Good morning!” chirps Jade as you peer in. With her dog ears and mostly black outfit, you're reminded for a split second of Jack Noir, and your heart pounds. She's kicked off her slippers and is lying on her back on John's couch, tossing a Squiddle in the air with her spacey powers. Its stout tentacles wave as if to beg for release from this aerial torment. Hovering just above the rug are the four planets, revolving slowly around Skaia.

     “Hey.”

     “Is your wing still okay, or are you going to admit that you need help?” Jade teases, sticking out her tongue. You run your hand through the back of your hair.

     “Uh, actually. You know what? Yeah. It hurts like a bitch." You blink. "Not that there's anything wrong with being a bitch,” you backtrack.

     One of Jade's ears flicks. “That would have gone over my head if you hadn't pointed it out, but thanks for reminding me to get offended,” she snorts.

     “Yeah. Well. You don't have to do it now. I'll catch you later or something.”

     “Are you leaving?”

     What do you say? _Yes, Jade, I have to leave right the fuck now – you see, talking to you alone induces nerves so bad that the only solution is to dive head-first out a window?_ Should you stay now that she seems disappointed you're desperate to escape?

     “Maybe!” you end up shouting accidentally. Jade raises her eyebrows.

     “Well, John is home right now salvaging some stuff. The shale imps really wrecked the place. You just missed him.”

     “Oh.”

     If you had caught him earlier you might have been able to go with him. As much as he's been an ungrateful shitstain throughout your spritehood, he's still your best friend. You didn't go back in time to rescue his dumb ass from Typheus for nothing, and it would have been nice to talk things out with him on LOWAS. Maybe then you'd feel better. Maybe then the prospect of the next three years wouldn't seem so painful. But you'd feel intrusive asking to visit his planet uninvited. Another time, then. You'll have to wait.

     “Do you know when he'll be back.”

     “Nope! He needs some time to himself, so quite frankly I have no idea what he's doing! Do you want to wait here?” Jade asks. She pulls herself up and folds her legs.

      You are so hung up on her voice. You know she lived in the middle of nowhere, but her accent sounds like none you've ever heard before. Her words are low and lilting, like she's used to whispering all the time, soft and unaccustomed to shouting. You don't know what you expected – a cheerleader stuck in cheer mode, maybe? She sure used a lot of exclamation marks for someone whose voice barely carries above a murmur in real life. Not that you're in any place to be criticizing how people talk. You aren't unaware of how your voice has changed; you sound permanently sick now, like a crow got trapped in your throat and is trying to get out.

      “Davesprite?” Oh. You zoned out.

      “I'll be back. Just pester me later and we can hang out, I guess.”

      “Oh. Well, all right.” Jade's ears flatten. You doubt she can control how visibly slighted she looks. The ears don't aid in subtlety.

      “See ya, then.”

      “Yeah. Okay, bye.”

      You turn to leave, but pause with your hand on the door panel. The ghost of a thought you had last night comes back, and you swivel to ask Jade another question.

      “Uh. Jade.”  
  
      “Yes?”  
  
      “Not that there's any rush, but there's something I'd like to do on LOWAS later. For personal reasons.”

      Understanding flickers on her face. “Do you mean...?”

      “Yeah. That. It needs to be taken care of.”

      Jade nods. You aren't looking forward to burying your bro, but it squicks you out to imagine him rotting on John's planet forever.

      “Thanks. Bye, then.”

      “Bye.”

      You float out of the room with humiliation buzzing in your head.

 

      It occurs to you that Jade never answered your question the day before. The one about remembering being Jadesprite. You're not going to lie – it was nice having at least one sprite to talk to who wasn't elderly or a cat. And you won't pretend it didn't sting to have that taken away from you. But your cheeks burn when you remember asking Jade about her. What were you thinking? You're embarrassed that you had to bring it up, afraid that she resents you for comparing the two, and absolutely mortified that no matter what, Jade appears completely unfazed by your behavior. She still wants to be your friend, so why are you sabotaging yourself?

 

      For a while you drift around the battleship, scoping everything out while you overthink every conversation you've had in the last twenty-four hours. As you float through a mostly empty hall filled with rows of yellow desktop computers, you relive your first combative exchanges with John after your prototyping. When you wind down a drafty bronze stairwell, you think you're beginning to remember alpha Dave's irritation with you – every disguised sneer and twitching eyebrow that you're certain you're not imagining, are you? You pace around the abandoned captain's cabin, shedding feathers on overturned boxes of censored war documents as you recall the few interactions you had with the Rose of this timeline. You chew your talons and wonder whether she was just lying about remembering your offshoot to make you feel better. And you've come back around to the residential quarters by the time you remember Jadesprite again, how she had turned to notice you, had seen you all battered and bleeding and let out a scream that they only use for stock audio in TV commercials.

      Wait, that part didn't happen. You freeze in the middle of the hall and swivel around. No, you definitely did not imagine that. The cry takes a moment to fade fully, and traces of it echo through the steel walls. At the far end of the corridor, a door creaks open and a lanky Dersite peers out. She gives you an accusatory glare.

      “That wasn't me,” you say.

      The Dersite huffs and shuts the door.

      Your heart pounds, and at first you can't bring yourself to investigate. You may have only spoken to Jade for a few hours total, but it has to be her. You've imagined nearly the same scream before. Countless times, really. When you're lying awake in a dying timeline, your thoughts turn to the morbid. The sound of it has been embedded in your mind – a shower of meteors raining on the other side of the Medium, her house destroyed and her along with it.

      Seconds go by. A muffled commotion comes from a few halls down – the dull thuds of objects falling, a raised voice, and low sobbing. There are also the clips of a harried conversation.

      “... it couldn't have just... all by itself....”

      “... believe me, I don't know how it....”

      The hair on the back of your neck stands up. Finally, you will yourself to follow the source.

 

      Someone made it to the scene before you did. You stop in the doorway of the living room. Nanna floats in front of Jade, her ghost hand planted firmly on one of her shaking shoulders. Jade is a mess. Her cheeks are shining with tears, her glasses in one hand as she rubs one eye with the bottom of her palm. The force of her sobbing takes the breath out of her. Her inhales are short and raspy.

      “Listen to me, Jade. You aren't making any sense,” Nanna hisses. Her tone chills you. She's discarded the harlequin hat, and the white hair underneath is disheveled. Though she has her back turned to you, you can tell she's fighting off anger. “I need you to take a few deep breaths and explain to me how this happened.”

      Jade takes in a rattling inhale, which promptly collapses into fresh sobs. She manages to slip in a few words as she trembles. “I already... told you! I don't know... it just... made this... _sound_ , and now... he's....” She breaks from Nanna's gaze and stares you straight in the face. “Davesprite?”

     Your feathers fluff up. Somehow it feels like you've been discovered from a secret hiding place. Nanna's hand drops to her side. She looks at you with lips tight, her expression stony.

     The three of you assess each other.

      “Davesprite... I'm so....” Jade murmurs almost inaudibly. Her eyes are wide, swimming with tears as though you're sentencing her to death row. The back of your neck is cold.

      “What's going on?”

      “I....” whispers Jade. “You... have to understand....”

      You take up a calmer stance, reaching out and lowering your shoulders. “Just... it's all right, Jade. Tell me what happened.”

      Nanna clicks her tongue, placing a fist on her hip and looking the other way. “Why don't you look for yourself?”

      Jade helplessly follows Nanna's line of sight, and you look at what lies behind them.

      At first you don't realize what exactly is wrong with the picture in front of you. The planets continue to float above the rug – except there's only four now. An ugly scorch mars the gray fabric, a thin wisp of black smoke still rising. LOLAR, LOFAF, LOHAC... where is John's planet? Your stomach drops, blood roaring in your ears. You can barely hear Jade as she continues to plead with you.

      “Please, Davesprite, I didn't mean for this to happen.” She's short of breath still, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Nanna faces the wall, her head bent low.

      “I don't... how....” you mutter. The room spins. “Is he... is John....”

     “He's dead,” Nanna spits. “The planet imploded.” Jade covers her face with her hands. Her ears are swiveled all the way back, flat against her hair.

 

      “Dead... John is dead....” A lump rises in your throat, and when you turn back toward the door you feel like your knees would buckle. A phosphorous, oily smell begins to fill the room.

      “Davesprite,” Jade starts, reaching out for your shirt sleeve. You jump away, and she shrinks at your reaction. “Please say something.”

      Say something? You can barely understand her, let alone force your brain to form coherent sentences. The room feels impossibly hot, burning as though there are lava rivers just under your room and the AC is broken and you haven't been spoken to or touched by anyone in what feels like weeks and you have two chat windows open that no one is responding to and why won't they answer you and every inch of you is sticky with sweat and–

 

     You are out of the room before you know you're leaving, your palm pressed along the wall to keep you upright. You are disproportionate without your right wing – as you stumble away you lean to the left, threatening to collapse on the floor. If you did, you're not sure you could get back up.

     Maybe Jade calls out after you, begs for you to stay, for some sort of reassurance that you don't hate her. Maybe she doesn't. You don't know.

 

      By some miracle you wind up back in your own room, collapsed in your soiled feathers with the chain of your sprite pendant reverberating on the porthole sill. Whether it's seconds, minutes, or hours that pass by, you can't tell which.

 

      Eventually your head leaves room for a steady stream of consciousness, and a single thought rings through you.

      “I'm double-doomed,” you mutter into the bed sheets. A new record. Doomed once, doomed twice – nothing's changed but the scenery. The grinding gears of LOHAC echo until you pass out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> walk it off youll be fine


	3. Chapter 3

     Put simply, your world is falling apart around you. Put literally, John's world is leaving a sickly-smelling burn on the rug.

     Crouched low, your fingers trace the edges of what was the Land of Wind and Shade. Although your head is swimming and you feel sick to your stomach and you've cried yourself completely out of breath, you reach deep into the center of you that is First Guardian, seeing each scorched atom separate and complete. You search for some way to rearrange them at once – click them all together like a quadrillion-piece puzzle until the planet is whole and your brother's cells form a body once again. But the chemical reactions of the implosion have ruined any chance of this being possible. The elements have been hopelessly scrambled – you can't form anything from what remains, except maybe a ball of ashes. Can a god tier resurrect if there isn't a body left?

 

     You are completely and totally fucked.

 

      Nanna left you a while ago, drifting out without a sound while you sat in a heap on the floor. Davesprite left before her – his eyes all glazed over, giving the thousand yard stare before bolting. You can't imagine how much he must loathe you now. His very existence was built off of rescuing the two of you, and now you've let it all come undone. You thought they had both left for good, but Nanna returns while you're lost in thought.

      “Stand up, dear,” she murmurs. Her voice is gentle now, but her body language is still rigid. “Come on now, get off the floor.”

      You let Nanna ease you up and shuffle you across the room, leading you to the couch from your foyer. She opens your hands and places a glass of water in them, folding your fingers around it.

      “You'll dehydrate if you're not careful,” Nanna sighs, rubbing your back and settling onto the couch beside you.

      You lift the glass, but pause with the cold rim pressed against your bottom lip. Every cell in you feels depleted. Nanna has to tilt the bottom of the glass toward you until you finally drink. The water is freezing, but your head begins to pound a little less once half the glass is empty.

 

      Business as usual continues in the hall. Nanna closed the door behind her, but you can hear normal conversations carrying on between passing carapacians. No one knows what's happened. Or if they heard you, they just don't realize why it is that you screamed. Their lives press on undisturbed. You wonder what will happen once you tell the Prospitians that one of their legendary heroes is dead. If you're lucky, you can get away with none of them asking after him. You don't know what you'll tell them if they do.

      “I'm sorry,” you whisper into the bottom the glass. Your voice is faint, lips barely moving to form the words. Nanna exhales through her nose.

      “Do you have any clue as to how this happened?” she asks.

      “No... I wasn't....” _Wasn't what? Paying attention?_ “I wasn't watching. I knew... John needed time to... for himself, you know... I wasn't watching.”

      Nanna starts to rub your back again, sweeping circular motions that relax your hunched shoulders. “So you didn't see what caused it?”

      “No.”

      “I see.”

      He would be back by now, if his body could reform as good as before. You close your eyes. He really is gone.

 

 

      John knocked on your door this morning rather than pestering you – it was strange, having someone wake you up who wasn't a dog jumping all over your bed. You sat in the empty kitchen together, eating cereal out of the box while John talked about what he hoped to save from the underling's destruction. You told him you could just teleport the oil atoms from his belongings, that he wouldn't even be able to tell where they were stained. He laughed about the bathtub Rose left in his hallway, wondering if you could fix that as well.

      “Are you going to be okay?” you asked.

      He stared at his folded hands for a while, his smile all but wholly vanished. “Maybe,” he answered. “I won't know until I'm back there.”

      “Well, take your time,” you said. “I'll leave you alone until you're ready to come back.”

      He nodded slowly. “Thanks.”

 

      You waited for an hour, lazing about and forcing yourself not to look into John's house. You had hoped that Davesprite would help distract you, that maybe cleaning up his injuries and catching up would draw your mind from your worrying. But he seemed so averse to being with you, like your mere presence made his skin crawl. You don't understand what you did wrong.

      If he didn't want to talk to you before, you're certain he'll never want to now.

 

 

      “Jade?” Nanna asks. She's been posing more questions, but your thoughts tuned her out. Her voice comes in like waking from a dream. “Do you feel calmer yet?”

      Calm, she calls it. How could you ever be calm again? “I don't....”

      “I'm sorry, that isn't what I mean. You'll have to forgive me, dear. Being dead for thirteen years makes you forget the nuances of polite conversation.” She chuckles a bit, and you can tell she's trying to cheer you up, but it only makes you feel more miserable. You've let her child die.

      “No, I... that's not....” You sigh. It was already difficult enough answering a bunch of humans talking to you in real time – you don't have the barrier of Pesterchum now to allow you to formulate your sentences carefully. With your current state of mind, it's even harder to articulate how you feel. “I just don't... know what I'm supposed to do now.”

      “Hmmm. Well, you can't change course now, can you?”

      “No.”

      Nanna pushes up her glasses. “In that case, it seems to me that we're just going to have to find a way to deal with it!”

      You shrink away. “How can I... how will that happen?”

      “I don't expect you to believe me, Jade. But what just transpired is only one in a list of the worst things to happen in my life. Or un-life, as it were! It doesn't mean I'm not upset, mind you. But I've had my taste of these sort of tragedies.” You look up at her, and a sad look has settled onto Nanna's face that doesn't seem related to your current situation. She stares at something beyond the ship's hull.

      “So... will you be okay?”

      Nanna blinks. She takes a moment to consider your question. “It will take some time. I'm still quite shocked. But yes, I do believe I will be okay.” She takes your hand in hers, sweeping over your fingers with her thumb. “However, I'm not so concerned about myself. I still have one child to protect.”

      You hang your head, and hair droops forward to obscure your vision. You wish she wouldn't allude to your status as her child. It only exacerbates your shame. “I'm sorry, Nanna. I'm so sorry.” New tears form in your eyes, dripping off your chin and staining your lap. “You must have been so excited. And now it's ruined.”

      Nanna pulls you toward her, and you bury your face in her shoulder. “Now, now. It's not ruined yet. We still have three years.” She rests her cheek on the top of your head. “But I'll tell you this: there's nothing to apologize for. You had no way of knowing this would happen.”

      “I should have been keeping an eye on him.”

      “You gave your brother some much needed privacy while he absorbed what happened to him,” Nanna murmurs. “He's lost a lot in the past day. I'm sure it still seemed unreal to him. You did the right thing by giving him that time.”

      Your hands ball into fists. “I just don't... understand what could make this happen.”

      “It doesn't matter how. It only matters that it did. Torturing yourself with questions will only make things worse.” You wonder how she can say all of this without even a trace of doubt.

 

      Again you remember the _sound_ of it, the horrible visceral crack that had made you sit up and wonder if something inside the boiler room had broken. A rift had opened up on the Land of Wind and Shade, splitting the blue planet open and revealing the glowing magma within. It happened so quickly that you couldn't even think of teleporting John away – maybe he was dead already. The planet continued to crack, and its fractions began to fall away from the core before the final implosion. An entire world – its history, its culture, and your brother destroyed in a flash. It was almost funny, really. Maybe it would have been more dramatic from its true size in the Medium. You can't imagine how terrifying it was to be John, if he was still alive by the time everything went up in light. But from your perspective, it was like watching a scientist on YouTube make a fruit explode for fun. The palm-sized planet was burnt to a crisp before it all crumbled onto the floor. A thin tower of smoke continued to rise as you blinked at the spot LOWAS once hovered. At first you could only stare. Once you realized that the light show in front of you meant John was dead, you doubled over and screamed.

      What is this? Punishment? Echidna had asked you specifically to take the four lands with you – was she tricking you? Why would she ask if the planets were not meant to survive outside the Medium? Was your alliance with your denizen a sham, only a one-sided contract while she knew that you would never make it to the next session? You tremble.

 

      Gradually you pull away from Nanna, resting the glass of water on the floor. “I... have to leave. I can't be in here anymore.” With a flick of your fingers, the four remaining planets disappear into your sylladex. When you stand, your feet feel almost too heavy to carry you forward. The room reeks, and nausea ripples through you.

      “I understand, dear.” Nanna's ghost hand picks up your glass as she rises out of her seat. She follows you out of the room, switching the lights off and latching the door behind you both. The hall suddenly seems too bright, and you squeeze your eyes shut.

      “Nanna... I'm sorry. But I need to be alone.”

      “No need to apologize. Go lie down, Jade.”

      “Yeah. I'm sorry. I'll come see you later.” You squeeze the bridge of your nose.

      “I'd like that. But you need to rest for now.”

      “I know. I will.”

 

      When you collapse onto your bed, you're surprised to find that the tears you've been holding back won't come. Your cheeks itch from those that have already dried. You stare at the ceiling, eyes unfocusing as you think about everything and nothing at once. It takes a great deal of effort not to see what Davesprite is doing. Even a minuscule lapse in your impulse control and your Bec-sight would kick in on autopilot, pinpointing his exact location in space whether you care to look or not.

      Your throat feels dry, and a hollow ache prevents you from sitting up. Eventually you swallow your fear and roll over, retrieving your captchalogued phone and opening a new Pesterchum window.

 

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 12:37 --

GG: davesprite?

GG: are you there?

GG: ...

GG: im sorry

GG: i get if you dont want to talk right now

GG: but i just needed you to know that

GG: can you answer when you get a chance

GG: it doesnt feel very sincere apologizign to a phone screen

GG: sorry my handsare shaking still

GG: um

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] is an idle chum!--

GG: ok

GG: well

GG: please get back to me if you feel like talking

GG: i know this isnt how you expected everything to go

GG: im sorry for letting you down

GG: but you dont have to forg;ive me

GG: just.... stay safe please

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 13:02 –-

 

      He definitely hates you.

      Before you close out of the chat client, you see that no one else is online. Rose and Dave are displayed as permanently logged out, unreachable across the fourth wall. Davesprite's handle is at half-opacity, online but missing in action. And now John is offline too. Your chest aches when you see his chumhandle. Most of the names here are useless now.

      You lie in bed for what feels like most of the day. Nanna never knocks, leaving you to stare past the window and flood yourself with fear. What will you do for three years if you can't talk to anyone but your dead brother's dead grandmother? Your heart speeds up each time you remember that you're waiting for Davesprite to answer, then slows as the minutes pass and no message comes. You desperately need him to answer. You want to teleport to wherever he is, throw yourself to the ground and let him know how sorry you are for ruining his life, for making his sacrifices useless. No matter what he would say to you, you think you'd deserve it. He could curse your name and you would be grateful that he's acknowledged you.

 

      You need to get off this ship.

 

      Not without a tinge of anxiety, you release the planets from your sylladex, sans LOWAS. Warping onto LOFAF sends an incredible rush through your cells – you have to change your size precisely while shifting your entire position in space, and as you teleport to the outside of your house you feel the entirety of space squeezing the air out of you and pressing down on your molecules.

 

      When your lungs take in fresh breath, you are standing on the Land of Frost and Frogs. Your slippers sink into the snow-muddy ground. The air is humid now, and the hummingbirds are out in full force, flecking the treetops with their beating purple wings. For a moment you wonder if this planet will rupture into pieces as well, wiping you out without a trace. You almost hope it will. But you can't wish for death now. Hundreds of lives are in your hands. You will simply have to keep your ears perked for the first sign of danger.

      Oh, and you forgot that the top of your house had snowballed down the hillside. You stare down at it, examining the mess of toppled possessions inside. You'll have to stick it back onto the tower at some point. Further down the hill is your bed, launched from the house by the explosion of your dreambot. The snow that fell on top of it has melted, and you make a mental note to hang the sheets up to dry later. For now, you zap the bed back inside. It will take more work to rebuild your bedroom than you're willing to think about right now.

 

      It strikes you how loud everything is here. At home, the most sound you ever heard outside was the constant rumble of the ocean, perhaps far off tropical storms, the occasional plane carrying crates of rations, or isolated rainshowers you could see coming from miles away. But the planet is alive now, all choruses of frog croaks and insects and fluttering birds. The frogs you didn't need to create the Genesis Frog have come out, and they croak like it's going out of style. For the first time in years, your house is surrounded with palpable life.

      You hike up the rest of the hill to your front door, shutting it behind you and kicking your muddy slippers off. The foyer is nearly empty now. Across the room is the vibrantly painted mantle, above it a portrait of your dream self staring at nothing. The noise outside is muffled, and it feels strange not to hear the fire roaring, your grandfather mounted in front of it, his imposing shadow stretched almost to the ceiling. You can almost hear him asking you where your rifle is. As if you still need it. As if it wasn't foolish of you to keep pretending you could hear his voice at all. As the years passed, you forgot what it originally sounded like. The voice you heard until now was wholly fabricated.

 

      Transportalizers are unnecessary now. Stairs are no threat to you anymore – the risk of falling asleep mid-flight and breaking your neck at the bottom of the steps is next to none. Legs heavy, you float up the spiraling staircases to the atrium, which has been all but destroyed. The windows are blown out, your pots dumped into the mud hundreds of feet below. Sleek metal SBURB equipment takes their place. You run your finger along the end of one table, which has become a ramp now that the empty pots holding it up on one end have shattered.

      John's brief stint as your server player is clearly felt. You wonder if you will ever have the energy to garden again. To do so would be to wipe away his remaining presence here.

 

      You drift to the far end of the greenhouse, your fingers flitting along the sharp edges of glass along the window's metal frame. The terrain of LOFAF stretches far and wide – the Forge spits geysers of lava, the frog you've worked so hard to give life to sinking into its depths. Miles of greenish-blue treetops spread almost endlessly, broken up by flowing rivers and lakes. On the horizon is your towering quest bed. You try not to look at what still lies on it.

 

      Every last organism on the planet is ignorant to your unbearable grief. You lean forward and vomit.

 


	4. Chapter 4

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ dates 14-17 April, 2009

 

     You're pretty sure you got the worst planet this stupid-ass game could have possibly generated. Below the steel scaffolding holding your apartment aloft, heat rolls off the surface of a vast lava sea. To put it mildly, you're a little warm. Your sleeves are rolled up past your elbows, and your hair is beginning to get slick with sweat. You'd be less pissed about how uncomfortable your apartment has become _if_ you were making any sort of progress, but the frantic hustle your team has made through the game thus far has screeched to a halt.

      For what feels like the hundredth time today you jog down the stairs from the roof and work your way back into your room, squeezing past the equipment Jade deployed in your hallway. God damn, this game is prejudiced against apartment owners. You've been pacing like this for the past hour or so, toggling the messages that you are (and aren't) getting on Pesterchum with checking the roof for any signs of your brother. Both endeavors are leaving you increasingly frustrated.

      It's been fifteen minutes give or take since you last checked, but John still hasn't answered you. A chat window from Rose is blinking with new messages, but you ignore it to scroll through the last half of your conversation with your best bro.

 

EB: i gotta go!

EB: gonna blast off to the seventh gate.  
  
EB: and, uh, win this game i guess.  
  
TG: ok well it definitely sounds like youre fucking something up over there  
  
TG: but alright later  
  
EB: later.

TG: ......

TG: dude are you serious its been like five years how long does winning an apocalypse inducing game take

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] is an idle chum!--

TG: just goes to show you cant fuckin trust trolls to give you any sort of helpful or true advice

TG: like no offense bro but it sounds like you got played

TG: when youre done getting the shit beat out of you by a shrek made of oil or something hit me up ok

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] is an idle chum!--

TG: seriously man

TG: ..............

TG: john

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] is an idle chum!--

TG: ???

     A few more messages from Rose ping in the background, and you flick your desktop volume off. You switch to a chat window from Jade, who isn't answering your messages either. You're feeling really unpopular all of a sudden.

GG: hey dave sorry for the slow responses!!!!

GG: things are getting pretty intense here.... >.>

TG: intense

TG: what do you mean intense

GG: i mean intense as in fire falling from the sky intense!!

GG: bec is really freaking out

GG: so ive been away from the computer for a bit

TG: fucking hell

TG: ok

TG: kind of off topic here like im not trying to downplay the fact that fucking armageddon is happening outside your house

TG: and we can discuss that at length in a sec

TG: but have you talked to john at all in the past hour

GG: um no????

GG: we stopped talking a little bit ago

GG: he told me hed get back to me later though.....

GG: why??

TG: because he did a fucking professional backflip off a diving board of idle chum status into an olympic pool of missing in action is why

GG: oh nooo

TG: yeah that about sums it up all right

GG: dave......

GG: john didnt mention taking a gate anywhere did he????

TG: yeah

TG: how do you know that

TG: are you still there

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] is an idle chum!--

TG: you have got to be fucking kidding me

TG: jade come on you cant pull this same shit on me im already getting snubbed by john here ok

TG: this isnt one of your bullshit baba vanga prophecies is it

TG: was john not supposed to take the gate

TG: jade

\-- gardenGnostic's [GG's] computer exploded.--

 

 

      You jolt awake when the boiler begins to burn your good wing. Cursing and squawking, you flap the wing outward and topple to the ground.

      Once your entire body stops screaming, you run your talons through your hair, readjusting your sunglasses and wondering what time it is. When did you even fall asleep? You vaguely remember drifting down into the boiler room sometime last night. You've been wandering pretty much every corner of the battleship where you're certain Jade couldn't find you, assuming she wouldn't use her Jack powers to appear in front of you and beat you about the head and shoulders for not answering her messages. At one point you had become so nauseous from the constant sound of her texts that you took the battery out of your phone, tucking it on a ledge in an empty room and leaving it behind.

 

      For the second time in your life, your best friend John is dead. And your bro's body is gone too, to add insult to injury. So much for a funeral. Whatever. Cremation is a legitimate method of body disposal.

      You're still not ready to talk to Jade.

 

      It's currently taking ninety percent of your energy not to collapse in a heap of despair, covering yourself up with your one wing and never getting up again. You already felt like extra baggage by the time you had been zapped onto this ship. What is your purpose now that the person you sought to save still managed to die? If you shriveled up and disappeared right now, who would notice? In three years there will be a brand new shiny limited edition god tier Dave (now with posable legs!) to take your place, and then the loss of you would feel like a pinprick at worst. But there is still the problem of Jade, and her tears, and her begging for you to say anything at all, and her inexplicable need to keep messaging you intermittently for hours on end. The other ten percent is going towards the effort to forget her face, how fragile she looked, how miserable. You can't imagine what sort of comfort you would be to her.

      The boiler room is so dark that you don't even consider going back upstairs to the interior design equivalent of having lemon juice poured into your eyes. So you decide to do what you've become best at in the past four months (or one year) and pace endlessly until you stop thinking. It's less relaxing now that you don't have individual steps to count, but maybe you can make it work anyway.

 

      You swoop through the lower levels of the hull like a feathery knockoff of Casper the friendly ghost, piecing together just why it is that SBURB is hellbent on wrecking everything each time you do something right. You spent four months (or one year) busting your ass climbing the levels of the game so your team wouldn't be useless by the time you went back, but a whole lot of good that did them when the session wasn't winnable after all. You managed to talk Jadesprite out of a meltdown although you hadn't spoken to any living version of her for months, but now you're pretty certain that Jade completely overrode her memories. And although you were the last to find out that you had been signed up, stamped, and delivered to a one-way three-year journey without your consent, at least you would be able to enjoy spending time with the friends you fought to save. Even if they knew there was another, better Dave waiting for them on the opposite side of a giant window. Even if you couldn't relate to them anymore, you would be able to feel pride in the fact that they were literal gods because you couldn't bear another day knowing they were dead. But you can't even have that.

      Paradox space is cruel to the doomed. Maybe you've been cursed to ruin everything you touch. _Oh, you thought this was any sort of reward for your chivalrous deeds? Just kidding. Now deal with your grief alone._ One step ahead of you, nightmare gods.

 

      And yet this entire disaster still feels so avoidable, so pointless, so arbitrary.

      You're not proud of yourself, but you have been beating back the impulse to blame Jade for all of this since you first ditched her. How does an omnipotent space goddess just let a whole planet explode? How could she have not seen it, not sensed it, not teleported John away? It's pretty in-character for her, you guess – she was always forgetful. You believed her when she said she could talk to you in her dreams, if only for the fact that you kept having to explain things over and over to her while she was asleep. Her attention drifted easily, leaving you hanging for stretches of time before returning to Pesterchum as though none had passed at all. Old habits die hard. But it's also typical for Jade to blame herself for every small thing that goes awry, and the past couple days (you think?) have really taken the cake. Why blame her for this when she's already taking care of it for you? Though you haven't read a single message she's sent you, you know she must be ripping herself apart at the seams. You're in the same boat, figuratively and literally.

      It isn't helping that your injuries have continued to fester, either. You weren't lying when you said you aren't wholly organic anymore, but you expected your battle wounds to heal up better than they have so far. Your movements are jerky and stiff, crusted yellow blood drying to something resembling brown mustard stains. The bandages around your torso have begun to unravel as well, making you look like a half-assed Halloween mummy. You don't know what you were thinking, applying them over your shirt the way you did – but self-attended medical emergencies trump clear decision making. As for your wing, you can't even bring yourself to look. Not like you need to, to know it's fucked up – you've been leaving a feather trail all up and down the engine rooms. You remain hunched over, inhaling and exhaling in quick succession. Each breath you draw sends a hollow sting through your nerves, and a permanent stomachache has set up shop in your gut. Can sprites get necrosis?

 

      You haunt the engine rooms without knowing where you're headed, staring at a fixed point on the floor while your thoughts play hopscotch through different memories. Every now and then a boiler thumps like there's someone trapped inside, releasing a column of hot steam that makes your feathers puff up. Even more common is the occasional echo of someone running far above the ceiling, hard carapaced feet reverberating through the steel infrastructure below. You wonder fleetingly what the scene on the ship must have been like as it fell from the sky, its crew hauling whatever rations they could into sacks before jumping overboard to be slaughtered once their feet hit the chessboard. But you haven't put a lot of emotional stock into a war that barely concerned you. You were a revered prince of Derse once, but the symbolic meaning you held is no longer relevant.

 

      You aren't conscious of it happening, but your drifting train of thought takes you up through a winding copper stairwell. You barely register the chess people that walk clunkily up and down the stairs, or how they gawk at you. And with your sunglasses darkening your field of vision, you scarcely notice that the halls have become brighter now, that you aren't the only person on the entire floor anymore. You take indiscriminate lefts and rights through the corridors, allowing your impulses to control where your path leads. A trio of Prospitians stand chatting at the end of the hall, and their sudden outbreak of laughter yanks you into reality. Oh. When did you end up here?

      You look around to see if you can identify this place, but the battleship is a labyrinth – even a “you are here” map wouldn't help you. Well, if you don't recognize this hall, then you're probably a ways off from wherever your room is.

 

      Your guesswork turns out to be pretty shitty.

 

      A door to your right opens suddenly from the inside. The person who walks out takes no notice of you, a disheveled mess of hair shielding you from her sight like blinders. She's in the middle of mumbling something to herself that you can't make out, seemingly unaware that she's treading on the cuffs of her long pajama pants, or that the thin strap of her shirt is sliding off her shoulder. Jade lifts a shaking hand and rakes her fingers through her hair, pulling it back and noticing you for the first time. You jump back from each other. She yelps at the sight of you, but her eyes remain dull, like she sees you only at the most superficial level. The bags under her eyes are an impressive purple.

      You examine each other.

      Jade's face is nigh unreadable, a strange mix of sadness, confusion, and fear amalgamating in her features. You're suddenly aware that you look disastrous, and you're embarrassed that she can see you like this. She seems to try to form words, to make something more substantial than psychobabble leave her mouth, but nothing comes. And although you haven't made a sound that didn't originate from your bird half in days, you try to beat her to the chase.

      “So...” you start, swallowing when your words come out as a grating rasp. “I'm back now.”

 

 

      Jade's face softens, her eyes glossing over with a film of tears. You can't recall ever being angry with her at all, any blame evaporating into smoke. The baggy legs of her pajamas whisper as she walks toward you. She raises her hand slowly, like you're a squirrel in the yard who will bolt up a tree at the slightest fright. Her fingers hover just above the clumped feathers of your severed wing, her mouth slightly open. When her thumb brushes the scabbed skin tissue, you shiver. She looks up at you, and you hope that she can't see your eyes.

     “You let me forget.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the log between dave/sprite and john was ripped from canon until "EB: later"  
> the log with jade was totally made up, though


	5. Chapter 5

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 17 April, 2009

 

     Davesprite's hand was tense when you took it up in yours, the tips of his claws scratching your palm so lightly that he didn't even notice. Now you think he's more relaxed, his palm soft and his fingers hanging loosely between yours. You can't believe that his gaping wounds have slipped your mind until they were right there in front of you, but you've been more or less unaware of everything for the past seventy-two hours.

 

      You gave up on pestering him once his status went fully offline, which didn't happen until about forty hours after you lost LOWAS. At some point you lost the god tier garb, no longer feeling deserving of them – a trophy you've lost the right to bear. Instead, you lie wrapped up in the curtains that you had been using to protect one of your house's many unused rooms from the humid ocean air. Your bedroom had (and has) yet to be rebuilt, and you knew you had to alchemize more clothes eventually. But the only thing you did until today that could be labeled productive was hang up your sheets from one of the blown-out atrium windows. For almost two days you alternated between sleeping on the floor of different rooms, shuffling about like the ghost of Hamlet's father, and sending Davesprite messages the equivalent of poking him incessantly in the arm. _Are you ready to talk yet? Are you ready? How about now?_

      Three days have gone by like minutes, so you aren't feeling much better, nor has any of this quite set in as real. But your throat has stopped burning from your sporadic fits of puking, and you aren't stumbling about with nothing but curtains wrapped around you anymore. A foothold back into mental clarity has been achieved, you suppose. You aim to keep it that way for the next hour at minimum – Davesprite's wounds won't stitch themselves up, not to mention that you desperately need a distraction.

 

      He doesn't protest as you lead him to the medical ward. The rough plates of his birdlike skin graze your forearm, so you know he's following closely. You wonder if he hears how labored his breathing sounds. It's like a dying man is rasping into your ear, but your last few days have been so revolting that you can't find it in yourself to be grossed out. In fact, his obvious pain softens the misery you felt at his ignoring your messages. You doubt he could even use a touch screen efficiently with his two-inch talons, let alone do it with his energy being sapped by the day.

      Davesprite's sudden closeness after his previous AWOL status sets your nerves alight, and you half expect him to suddenly flee or start cursing you out. Each minute that passes without a word from him is both a relief and a potential red flag. But now that he's here, you don't know what you'd do if he left again. Being alone has done you no good.

 

      The hospital wing is modest, but it's more than you expected from a battleship of this size. It lies behind two swinging metal doors, which whisper when they close behind you. Davesprite hovers in front of them when you drop his hand, rubbing his arms and staring at the floor. The room smells like someone knocked a container of iodoform over and let it sit overnight. At the very least, the beds in here are all very crisply made; it would have been a shock to see a carapacian lying in any of them, left behind when the crew decided to flee. You can only hope that the soldiers who deserted didn't make off with everything that would be of use right now. That seems unlikely, though – the first glass-door medicine cabinet you explore is locked, and you have to tinker with it from the inside to get it open. It pops open with a flash of green.

      Davesprite is still floating at the doors, looking like someone whose only friend at a party left them behind. He coughs while you crouch in front of the cabinet.

      “You know, you can just sit on any of the beds over there.”

      “Uh. Yeah. Sorry.” Davesprite hunches his shoulders and sits on the nearest bed, adjusting himself cautiously and leaning into himself. If the bedsheets from the residential quarters were thin, these are basically tissue paper. You can hear them crunching every time Davesprite shifts in his spot.

      “What's the matter?” you ask, stretching your arm far back into the cabinet. “Do you not think I'm qualified for this?”

      “Well... probably anyone without like, a degree isn't... qualified....” he flounders. His first instinct is to sass you, but he's so shaken that the execution suffers. “Not that I think you're gonna fuck me up or anything.”

      “Good, because I'm not.”

      You find what you're looking for, pulling a bottle of peroxide out of a myriad of visually similar containers. Hardly any of them are labeled – you wonder how a carapacian doctor would be able to tell what's in them. It smells like it's peroxide, but just to be sure you use your Bec-sight to examine the molecules, eliminating the risk of putting something dangerous on him by mistake. Underneath another counter is a box of neatly folded white towels, and you decide take the whole stack for good measure.

      A ponytail holder zaps between your fingers, and you yank your hair back into a bun. To your surprise, the sink responds when you turn it on – like wifi in the Incipisphere and the sheer concept of your new found abilities, SBURB never fails to annoy you with the scientifically unexplainable. At first the faucet hisses with air, then an explosion of water comes out onto your hands.

      “Ack! Dammit,” you mutter.

      “You okay over there, doc.”

      “Yeah... air bubbles....” You flick your hands and vanish the water droplets in a quick burst of neon light. “All right, sorry for the delay,” you sigh, shuffling to Davesprite's bed with your arsenal of chemicals and washcloths hovering behind you.

      “I should say so,” Davesprite sniffs. “These waiting times are ridiculous. Have you considered getting magazines more recent than June 2007? If I need to read a _People_ while I wait for someone to tend to my disgusting flesh wounds, I wanna end up hip with the latest celebrity gossip by the time a nurse bothers to notice me.”

      “What?”

      Davesprite blinks. “Nevermind. Hospital jokes.”

      You take the cap off of the peroxide. “Do you not like them?”

      “Hospitals or outdated magazines.”

      “Hospitals!”

      Davesprite rubs the back of his head. “Psh, no. Why would I have any reason to be afraid of hospitals.”

      One of your ears swivels forward. “I didn't say 'afraid of,' I said 'like.'”

      “Oh.”

      You walk around to the other side of him, perching on the crinkly sheets and folding one of your legs up. “It's not like I have a frame of reference for what public places are like, or how justified anyone would be in fearing them. So I can't judge,” you say. “But either way, brace yourself. This is going to sting.”

      “What's in that – FUCK!” The ruff of Davesprite's feathers puff up as you trickle peroxide over his severed wing. He bites down on one of his fingers, shoulders trembling.

      “I said it would sting.”

      “Yeah, I believe you!” he nearly shouts. “ _Jesus_.”

     “If it makes you feel any better, it stinging just means that it'll be tough on whatever sort of... lingering bacteria you've got going on.”

      You zap a sick bucket onto the bed behind him, placing one hand near the base of the wing and using the other to take out loose and bloody feathers with a cloth. The muscles on his back remain tense, and although he doesn't complain that you're defeathering him like a Thanksgiving turkey, you can tell he wants to. His blood regains some of its nearly radioactive glow, slick with peroxide.

      “Yeah, I'm sure there's all sorts of Jack germs left behind. Who knows how many people he gored with the same fuckin' sword before he got around to me.”

      “Exactly.”

 

      He hangs his head as you wash and pluck his wing. You become so lost in the monotonous work that Davesprite has to snap his fingers at you before you realize he's trying to get your attention.

      “Sorry, what?” you ask, looking up from the bucket. It's full of feathers now, and you make a mental note not to let him see inside once you're done. It would probably freak him out.

      “You said Jack was the one who made you go god tier.”

      “I wouldn't say he 'made me,' but yes, he was the one who carried me to my quest bed.”

      “Huh.”

      You tap your chin in thought. “And I guess he was sort of responsible for my death too, since the Dersite who bombed me was acting on his orders. But I think Jack lopped his head off for it.”

      “Like, he changed his mind about wanting you dead.”

      “I guess so!”

      Davesprite absorbs what you've said. To you, Jack's dedication to trailing you around the session and occasionally sticking his snout in your face for chin scratches was unusual but comforting, considering Bec was gone. Not that you weren't aware that he killed your friends' guardians. And his constant company never left you without a twinge of fear of what he might do. But a dog is a dog is a dog.

      “So being all mixed up with your devilbeast made him like you.”

      “At a level he probably didn't understand or was able to control, yes.”

      “Hm.”

      A new elephant in the room joins the first, squeezing next to each other and slinging their trunks all over the beds. Is it strange to him, that you share DNA with the one who killed his brother, who is responsible for the gore to which you're tending? Another layer of guilt settles in you, snowballing with the rest. That dumb, _dumb_ dog. You were never able to control him as most people are capable of with their non-space warping canines. But it didn't matter much until days ago.

      You swallow. “I don't know if you knew this or not, but Becquerel prototyped himself. I wasn't there when it happened.” Davesprite says nothing, so you continue. “I know that his gaining Bec's abilities is responsible for most of our problems. But... although he was smart, he was still just a dog. I wouldn't have been able to stop him from jumping into the kernel.”

      “I know.”

      “I... I don't know what I'm trying to say.”

      “It's fine.”

      “No, it's not.” You grab the fabric of your pajama pants, hands balling into fists. “I know I wasn't as, _present_ during the game as I should have been. So I feel that Jack's actions are a reflection of my ability to keep things under control... which just... fell apart after a while.”

      Davesprite exhales through his nose. “Well, it's not like I didn't fuck up either.” He turns his head slightly, and his voice softens. “Doomed timeline, remember. At least what you did during the session didn't revoke your alpha status.”

      A lump rises in your throat. How could you not be doomed by now?

      “Just... I'm sorry that that power got used against you. I don't know if Bec would have still prototyped himself if he understood what would happen. I guess I'm atoning for some of Jack's destruction by doing what I'm doing right now. But also because you're my friend.”

 

      Davesprite's wing twitches underneath your fingers, and you go back to washing it when he doesn't reply. You toss the first towel aside, taking up a new one and turning the bottle upside down into the fabric. He clears his throat.

      “You were right, by the way. Hospitals do kinda... I mean, I guess you could say I'm sorta afraid of them.”

      “Can I ask why?”

      Davesprite stares ahead. “I don't know. Because they smell weird? Because I don't like seeing the people who have it worse than me? You see fucked up shit in there.”

      “Davesprite?”

      “Yeah.”

      “How many times have you been to the hospital?”

      Davesprite's good wing fluffs out a bit, shoulders hunching. “I mean, I'm not saying I have a loyalty card in my wallet or anything. Like, after the tenth visit you get a blood transfusion free. But it's been a few times.”

      “Oh.”

      He tilts his head back. “The last time I went... god. It must have been six months ago. But that was before the game. So it feels like a lot longer.”

      It doesn't seem polite to ask questions, so you wait for him to elaborate. Davesprite's wing is almost as clean as you can get it, the feathers cleared from the point where Jack sliced it off. Does he know that the muscle under his skin is a peachy orange? The parts that are visible past flared up skin and dark scabs, anyway. Your fingers flit around the aggravated skin, dabbing it a bit more with the disinfectant. You won't feel right stitching this up until you're certain it's clean, so you zap away the remaining bacterial cells and minuscule debris you can find with your Guardian sight, vanishing them into the sick bucket with the rest.

      Davesprite doesn't continue his story for a while, perhaps censoring the bits he doesn't want to say aloud. “I think... yeah, I went there for a fractured rib. I was in the waiting room with a bunch of sweaty bleeding bozos for two hours before they showed me back. Was leaning over all funny the whole time, too. Maybe I should've gone back for the damage it did to my back.”

      “How did you fracture your rib?”

      He shrugs dismissively. “Oh, you know. Fell down some stairs. It's like that sometimes. Sometimes you just forget how to walk and topple head-first down a shitload of concrete.”

      Your lips curl into a tight smile. “I warned you, bro.”

      “God.” Davesprite laughs quietly, covering his mouth. “Yeah, I walked right into that one.”

      “You'll have to step up your game. Also, get up for a sec. Your wing is done.”

      “Really?”

      “Not technically, it still needs stitches. But I'm doing that all at once. I need to clean the rest.”

 

      You pace around to his side of the bed. Davesprite looks down at his gut, the bandages he wrapped around it all but fully unraveled. He jumps as you reach forward, unwinding them with a stiff whisper along the fabric of his t-shirt. The blood underneath has dried into an unappealing dark brown. It's been so compressed to his skin that it sticks to him like plaster. You try not to make a face as you toss the ruined wrappings away.

      “What were you thinking, putting gauze on _top_ of your shirt? That is completely ineffective,” you scold, putting your fists on your hips.

      “Yeah, I know. I was kind of in panic mode.”

      You wag your finger at him. “I'll forgive you this time. But there's no saving that shirt. It's disgusting.”

      He takes the hem of it in his hands, holding it out and sneering. “Yeah, uh, it really is.” He grimaces as he peels the fabric away from his torso, which makes a sound not unlike removing packaging tape from cardboard. “But with the wings, you know, I can't, really....” He jerks a thumb behind him.

      “Oh, duh. I'm just going to teleport it off of you, okay?”

      “Ready when you are.”

      Davesprite shudders when the the shirt warps off of him, and you toss it atop the pile of his feathers. He hugs his chest tightly, flickering his gaze around the room to everything but you. The distinction between what is and isn't his wound is yet unclear. Yellow trails from a gap in his chest to his lower gut. You motion for him to swivel around, and it's nearly as bad from the other side.

      You steeple your fingers and put on your best medical professional face. “That is quite a flesh wound, Mr. Strider.”

      “What's my diagnosis, doc. Be straight with me, I got three kids at home.”

      “My first recommendation is to sit back down. My second would be to not flip out, because quite honestly, you look super gross.”

      A smile flashes across Davesprite's face, then disappears as quickly as it came. “We need a stronger word. Personally, I think this shit can only be described as gnarly.”

      “It really is. Weren't you keeping your sword in there?”

      “Yeah, and it was convenient as fuck. Can't do it anymore, though. It'd just slide around all willy-nilly.”

      “Ugh, stop. _So_ unsanitary.”

      “Not all of us are so blessed with sylladexes and specibi. Count yourself lucky you don't gotta stick sharp weapons into a chest pocket. Lookin' like a street magic act gone wrong....”

 

      You clean the blood off of his lower spine first, preferring to keep hidden from his sight. It isn't as though you've forgotten that he gave you the cold shoulder for three days, or how much you think you deserve it. And although it floods you with relief to be able to talk to him again, to know with at least an inkling of certainty that he hasn't been spitting on the concept of you for seventy-two hours, you are still a bit ashamed to show yourself. You're glad he hasn't asked why you're dressed so casually. Whether you'll ever feel entitled to wear those clothes again, you just don't know.

      Davesprite's body begins to fade in opacity past his hips, his tail solid but insubstantial. It feels like touching an old TV screen, like it could glitch into static at any time. Though blood clings to his tail like normal skin, you still expect the cloth to pass through. As you clear the scabbing and dead skin away with regular sweeping motions, the shape and size of Jack's slice becomes evident. It's a ragged gash, picking up from the bottom of the chest wound given to him by prototyping and ending in a crooked hook past his belly button. It's curious how it affects him; though lack of treatment has made him clearly ill, it's obviously a tough job to kill a sprite. A kind of god tier in its own right, maybe – near immortality by virtue of downloading your consciousness into a body beyond human.

      “You know,” you wonder out loud, tracing the original prototype wound. “I'm not sure that all of this is going to heal.”

      Davesprite starts when your fingertips graze the top of the laceration. “What's that mean. Is it just gonna be like that forever.”

      “Not the whole thing. Most of it will close,” you murmur, following the length of it with your thumb. “Where you were keeping the sword, I mean. It became part of you when you prototyped, so it may never go away.”

      He exhales just barely. “Shit, okay. You scared me.”

      “I can stitch it shut with the rest, but don't be surprised if the skin comes apart once they're removed.”

      “God, getting them out is worse than getting them in the first place,” groans Davesprite, throwing his head back. “Can't you just clap your puppy paws together and magic them out or something.”

      “That's the idea. I know this place isn't the most exciting place to be. I'll try to make it easier on you. With my puppy paws.”

      “Thanks.”

      “Man, I don't even know how I'll get away with closing it all up though,” you sigh, resting your face in one hand. “The wing should be easy, but with all of this... if you weren't a sprite you'd be long dead.”

      Davesprite starts to open his mouth, then turns away. Your heart skips painfully when you realize what you've said.

      “I'm glad you made it out, though,” you backtrack, cheeks warming. “I know I seemed pretty confident in being able to do this, but if you were 'organic,' as you called it....”

      “Yeah,” he sighs heavily.

      “Your spine would be totally severed. It's a relief not to worry about real surgery or anything.”

      “I can't walk either way,” Davesprite shrugs. His claws dig into his upper arms. “Doesn't matter to me.”

      “Right. Can you shift around to the other side?”

      “What.”

      “For your stomach?”

      “Oh, shit. Okay.”

 

      The tissuey sheets crumple as Davesprite gets up and turns to face you, his long sprite tail hanging over the edge of the bed and trailing for a few feet on the tiled floor. He clenches his fists on either side of him, and the sheets crunch between his fingers. His jaw is clamped shut, furrowed eyebrows visible past his shades. You have him lean back onto his elbows, and he stares at the far end of the room while you wipe up the rest of his injuries. Your legs dangle off the side of the bed, pant cuffs occasionally brushing against the long primaries of Davesprite's good wing. Working your way from the bottom of the laceration up, you pick up the pace as he visibly squirms. Though he's stopped cursing about the peroxide, you can tell it still badly stings him.

      “Are you going to keep storing your sword in there? I mean, if it doesn't close.”

      Davesprite tilts his head from side to side. “Maybe, maybe not. No need for a sword on this ship. None of the chess dudes look like the type to jump you while you're just trying to mind your own business. I might have to start defendin' myself against that overgrown tentacle cat, though.”

      “Oh nooo, don't skewer Jaspers.”

      “You don't like him either.”

      “Only in theory! In practice he is only a small harmless kitty cat. I don't actually have a grudge against him, or any cute animal. It's just dumb dog stuff.”

      “God, this place is gonna end up like if you gave a bunch of animals the ability to think like humans and told 'em to go wild. What's that fuckin' book called... we're gonna be _Animal Farm_.”

      You snicker. “We are far outnumbered by hundreds of multicolored amphibians with rudimentary English skills.”

      “See, that's what I mean. They're like the little furry serfs and we're the furry feudal lords. It's a mass culture of furries.”

      “Furry serfs?”

      “This place would make for a great reality show.” Davesprite starts. “We'd shoot it like a mockumentary, though – that's hot shit right now. Half the show would be like, us running around in circles chasing each other while yelling 'SORRY SORRY I DON'T MEAN IT SORRY' really loud.”

      “Except for you, because you're the poor, sweet prey animal, remember?” You can't hide how big your smile is. It's a relief to hear Davesprite launch headfirst into a classic ramble, and it sounds exactly like you thought it would in real life. The muscles in his stomach relax.

      “Hell yeah. See, I'd get all the audience support because I'm the underdog, you know? People are like, 'damn, that guy's bein' like, all chased by Cthulhu cats and anime dog girls all the time. AND he's disabled, look at that janky wing. I feel like I can root for this dude.' Then they buy all my merch from the online store and I saunter out of here with like a billion boonies. That's how people respond when you're relatable.”

      “What's the show called?”

      Davesprite scrunches his lips together and looks at the ceiling. “Let's say the working title is  _The Fresh Furries of Bel-Air_.”

      “I haven't watched a lot of television in my life, but I can tell you put no effort into that.”

      “Shit Jade, you busted me.” Davesprite laughs out loud, and it cheers you to hear him use your name. “Let me know if you come up with a better one.”

      “I'll try.”

      “Yeah. And you know in those shows, they like, sometimes they'll be giving this look at the camera while stuff's going down, like, 'can you believe this fuckery?' And that would be my thing. You can't see my eyes 'cause they're all cool behind the shades, but that's part of the mystery. What's that guy thinkin'? You never know.”

      “That's funny. _Mysterious_ ,” you snort.

      “Oh, like I'm not a total enigma. I'm two rungs from Illuminati status.”

      “Yeah, sure.” You've gone through half the stack of cloths now, and the peroxide is light in your hands. The heat radiates from where it stings his skin. His rambling is probably to stave off how badly he wants to keel over. You lightly tug away dead tissue with the damp cloth in your hand, and he barely winces.

      “But that could be a funny scene, though. They pull me aside for interviewing, as they are wont to do, because I have basically the most premium opinions on all subjects –”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Yeah. So they got me in this chair in the kitchen and I'm like, 'Jade told me today that I can't be mysterious.' But I get this shit-eatin' look and I tap my temple like this and I say 'But little does she know about The Vault.'”

     “The vault?”

     “The _Vault_. Capitalized for emphasis.”

     “My bad.”

      “Don't worry about it. And I go on a tangent about the Vault and all the fucked up shit that's locked up in there. All those little experiences that change you, y'know, but you can't really share them with anyone else. So they're like these secrets that you carry around. Like the time I saw Guy Fieri at a Chipotle near my apartment. He was sitting outside eating a burrito and I slowed down 'cause like, shit, that's Guy Fieri. No one else seems to notice he's there. In that second it was just me and him. And I was so transfixed, y'know? 'Cause that's Guy Fieri. And he must have gotten a bad batch of pork or something, because he very slowly spits his food like, back into the little red tray it came in.”

      “Ew!”

      “The train to Flavortown was going nowhere fast. It came out like molten lava. And you couldn't tell what he was thinkin', like what could have possibly provoked this blatant display of disrespect for food, on account of his _shades_. Time was slowed immeasurably. And then Guy just keeps eating like nothing happened. It was an out of body experience. In that moment I had like, this burning wish that I was a poet of a more gentle persuasion, instead of one who sets shit on fire verbally for kicks.” Davesprite plants a hand on his chest. “It's those little miracles that made me the person you see before you today. We're all just being pulled along by these random happenstances. And Guy Fieri spitting his Chipotle out on that fateful day in 2008 contributed to my life story. That's the kind of shit that's stored away in the Vault.”

      “I think your tangent caused another tangent of its own.”

      “It's a gift, Jade. I wouldn't expect you to understand.”

      “Woe is me,” you giggle.

      “You'll get over it. So while I'm tellin' this story the background is kinda blurred out, 'cause I'm like, the focus of the shot. And I'm casually drinkin' some a.j. I pulled out of my handy dandy chest pocket –”

      “Oh my god....”

      “Just takin' some sips between sentences for emphasis, but also 'cause telling that story makes me emotional, so I gotta hydrate.”

      “Understandable.”

      “But slowly it blurs out on me because the cameraman saw that you were tying Jaspers' tail to a ceiling fan blade, so they refocus on whatever's going on there. And I don't even notice, so by the time I'm done with the Guy story I'm like 'what are you looking at. Oh my god that poor cat, someone stop this cruel menace to society.' That's the kind of shit that goes viral. We'd be instant classics.”

      “I wouldn't do that, though!” you cry. “Also, I'm sorry that I didn't mention it before, but I have no idea who Guy Fieri is.”

      Davesprite's mouth forms a perfect O. “You're kidding.”

      “I'm not.”

      “Jesus Christ. That has got to be fixed. Once you accept Guy Fieri as a part of reality your whole world gets flipped turned upside down. Remind me to show you a picture soon. You'll get the gist.”

      “It's a plan.” You lean back and grin. “Your grand ideas for this show really took your mind off of all this.”

      Davesprite looks with surprise at his stomach, patting the sensitive skin lightly with his palms. You cross your legs and stretch your arms out in front of you; you've been done for a couple minutes and he didn't even notice.

      “Oh shit, would you look at that. Someone should just Xerox you off an honorary PhD right now.”

      “I'm flattered. Unfortunately, you're probably going to hate this next part even more. Sorry in advance.”

      “It's okay. As long as I leave here without my guts spilling out of me, I'll be sure to give you a five star Yelp review.”

 

      You carry the sick bucket away, kicking it under the sink counter until you decide how to get rid of its contents. Only an inch of peroxide is left in the container; you set it back in the medicine cabinet and go about looking for the rest of what you need. A cabinet almost to the ceiling is full of fine instruments, and you float up to open it, your toes just barely above the surface of the counter.

      “What are you looking for.”

      “Oh, just all the tools I'll need for suturing. Surgical thread, some scissors, syringes, maybe some morphine if there's no other anesthetics in here... hey, are you afraid of needles?”

      Davesprite stares at you with his mouth open. “Am I what? Afraid of... needles, no, not really.”

      “What's wrong?” You glance at his strange expression before going back to rummaging around. You could just appearify everything in front of you, but it's better to get a feel for what's in here in case an emergency arises.

      “Uh... nothing.” Davesprite pauses. “Actually, no. Did you just say morphine like mor- _fine_?”

      Your brow furrows. “Is mor-pheen how it's really pronounced?”

      “Yes?”

      “Oh. Hm. There are a lot of words I've never heard out loud. It sounded right in my head when I read it.”

      Your explanation seems to only baffle him more, but he drops the subject.

      It isn't a big deal, if not a bit of a shock compared to how you've always perceived yourself, but since you've started this journey you're suddenly aware of how differently your voice sounds from the others. At times it seems like your inflections are all wrong, and you prefer to listen rather than speak just to study the way they form certain words. You've spoken to many people on Prospit, but the vast majority of carapacians are more or less nonverbal, so your conversations were more gestural. Your voice may become completely different if given enough time. These small misunderstandings will probably be routine for a while, though.

 

      You pull a small plastic tray from the bottom shelf and line up your armory of surgical tools. They gleam under the fluorescent lights, looking like they've never been used. You sigh with relief when you discover a plastic pack of needles and thread – you feared carapacians wouldn't keep them, with their exoskeletons probably protecting them from these types of wounds. Maybe they get cuts on their softer joints, you wonder. The needles inside are tiny, curved into silver semi-circles.

      “I might have to alchemize a bunch of these,” you think aloud, tearing the bag open with your canine teeth.

      “What.”

      “Oh, I'm just talking to myself. There's a whole bunch of thread and needles in this thing, but I might have to leave at some point to duplicate them.” You hop down with your tray and rest it on a wheeled table standing in the middle of the row of beds. It squeaks when you roll it over beside Davesprite's bed. The tray rattles, full of plastic syringes, tiny scissors, and a tall corked glass of transparent mor-fine.

      He stares at the contents of the open pack. “Are you saying all that shit may not be enough?” You believed that he's unafraid of needles, but now he looks more distressed.

      “Davesprite, be realistic. You have, like, four feet of lacerations! And most of them have literally torn through your entire body. Did you think I was stitching up a papercut?”

      “No,” sniffs Davesprite. “But how long are they gonna have to stay in. Stitches are ugly, Jade. I hate walkin' around lookin' like an extra in a horror movie about haunted dolls.”

      “You won't look worse than you already do,” you tease. “And anyway, I'm not sure if sprites can get scars!”

      “That's cold, Harls. Check out this bad boy, _that_ survived prototyping,” he protests, pointing at a small nick in his right eyebrow.

      “Be that as it may, it happened before the fact. And don't call me Harls again,” you add.

      “Yeah, that didn't roll off the tongue too well did it.”

      “Not at all.”

      “Alls I'm sayin' is that you're gonna feel bad for me when I end up all freakishly scarred like I landed in a ball pit full of swords. If Earth wasn't destroyed, middle aged moms would be sharing pics of me on Facebook. One like equals one prayer for this strange mutant bird.”

      “Are you going to let me get on with this or not?” you sigh. You've already been in here for close to an hour, and the chemical smell is beginning to give you a headache.

      “Go ahead, Doctor Frankenstein. You'd better call Igor in here, though. I need a witness.”

      “Your cooperation is appreciated,” you reply, imitating a dramatic bow.

 

      It's easier with space powers, but you decide to thread the surgical needle by hand. Since you're sort of rusty with the overall procedure, it helps to do it all manually – there's less risk that you'll mess up and launch a needle through Davesprite near the speed of light.

      He watches you intently as you thread the first needle. He's adjusted himself so that he's lying vertically on the bed rather than across it, propped up so that his back doesn't touch the pillow. You perch on the edge of the bed, holding the thread inches away from your glasses.

      “Hey Jade?”

      “Hmm?” You don't turn from your work, and you feel that your Bec ears are swiveled back in concentration.

      “Why do you know so much about stitching wounds yourself.”

      You finish threading the tiny needle, pulling it through and knotting it off. “Is it my turn for prying personal questions now?"

      “Obviously. That's the shit I'm all about. Won't stop until all concept of tact is destroyed.”

      You decide to pull the same trick Davesprite probably pulled on you and mull the answer over in your head, filtering what you're not ready to elaborate on. After all, he doesn't know that you cut open, stuffed, and mounted the corpse of your grandfather when you were a toddler a fraction of his size. That's a story for another day. You're almost glad that the evidence of your attempt at the family tradition has been lost. Seriously, the stitching down the face was just sloppy. Davesprite wouldn't understand how you had been taught taxidermy and firearm handling along with learning how to walk and talk. He wouldn't understand how you had grown up with your own corpse in the attic, watching yourself become reflected in her face and knowing that someday soon, you would die. And he definitely wouldn't understand, nor would _any_ of your friends have understood, if you had logged in one day and told them all goodbye.

      While your sewing skills have served you well for both the preservation of family values and the upkeep of high fashion, you've also used it for more dire purposes. Bec always kept a good eye on you, shadowing you nearly every second he spent awake. But there were slip ups. A bullet grazing your leg, or a tumble by the jagged rocks of the tide pools; your childhood was full of these small accidents, Bec bounding out to you with whimpers and licks, washing your wounds and pawing at you after zapping you into your own bed. You would always have to climb out right away to keep the blood off the sheets – you don't think Bec understood that lying in bed wasn't a cure-all for human ailments. You would limp down the stairs, making your way to the medicine cabinet and scrambling up to the top of the counter, diligently threading needles kept in tin cans. The first few times you needed to do this, you cried a little. You thought you were one step closer to becoming the scary ragdoll girl upstairs. But you got over it, as you got over a lot of things. By the time you were eight, you were comparing the aftermath of these mishaps to stitching closed a Squiddle whose stuffing was coming out. It was more fun that way. But Davesprite is unlikely to understand this, too.

      “Jade?”

      “I heard you. Geez... I guess you could say it was just part of wilderness survival training.”

      “Wilderness survival.”

      “Yup! My grandpa thought it was very important to be self sufficient in the wild!” you explain, shaking your fist dramatically. “Being able to treat your own cuts was part of that. And I don't regret having that skill, either.”

      “Okay,” Davesprite nods. “I get it, that makes sense. Because you lived in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.” You swallow; he believes you.

      “Exactly!” You force a smile and begin to fiddle with one of the syringes in front of you. “Anyway, let's finish this up for the day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if i keep making jokes maybe i wont cry all over the place. a flawless plan.....


	6. Chapter 6

      You would've never guessed that breaking the ice with Jade would involve her rubbing hydrochloric acid around what used to be your crotch, but life is full of surprises. If this is her idea of punishment for snubbing her, she sure is happy about it. Your current game plan is just to keep babbling until you don't feel like bursting into tears over what might be only three steps away from getting an actual chemical burn.

 

      Jade's eyes still glaze over at times when your conversation slows, her mouth settling into a tired frown. She must be trying very hard to distract herself with this busywork. You don't think she would be so earnest otherwise.

      But holy shit, did you underestimate how amazing it would feel to make her laugh, truly and genuinely, as if for a split second there was no exploded planet or three year road trip from hell. Compared to her wispy speaking voice, her full laughter is loud and unabashed, making her lean forward almost to her knees. It's a small comfort.

 

      Jade shot you up with morphine a few minutes ago, and she might have overdone it. You're feeling pretty woozy, though you're certainly in less pain than before. If you try to keep up all this banter you're likely to slur your words more and more until you just wake up with a bunch of black stitches running up and down your body. You'll look like Lil Cal did after Jack got him, too. It's funny to think about your bro stitching him up all carefully while you were in the game. End of the world? Killer chess man on the loose? Doesn't matter to this guy. He's got a nightmare puppet to fix. The thing is, the only reason Bro could be assed to sew up Cal himself was because there wasn't some other guy to do it for him. Oh, and because he parented that thing about five times harder than he ever did you. After all, that's why he sent you packing to the hospital every time he accidentally fucked you up in training. You know he could have patched you up at home it he wanted to. It would have saved a shitload of paperwork. But Jade wouldn't have understood that if you had decided to tell her.  
  
     The last time you got stitches was eight months ago after Bro's dumb anime sword got you across your left bicep. Luckily you didn't have to wait for very long – you rolled up with a wad of bloody paper towels pressed to your arm, and Bro had you pretend to faint so you wouldn't take up any more of his time. Not that he ever sat around in the lobby to wait for you. After a few years you climbed to the highly lauded rank of “Doctors Hate Him: Local Boy Was Born With Glass Bones and Paper Skin.” As soon as they saw your punk ass stroll into the building, someone immediately pulled your file out while Bro disappeared to who knows where and you kicked back with a year-old _National Geographic_. When they were through with you, you just walked out with your new cast or stitches or staples or crutch and the newest paperwork tucked into your back pocket. Sometimes Bro would already be back home, but other times you would pass him walking out of a Chick-fil-A and you'd fistbump him with whatever bullshit purple cast they put on you because they ran out of red.

      You're not sure why nobody who worked there ever pulled you aside with the “concerned and trustworthy adult authority figure” voice and asked you why you kept busting your ass all the time. It might have been how nonchalant you were about everything. Even if you had staggered in bleeding from the ears and mouth, you would've just given them a shaky thumbs up while one of your sunglass lenses sparkled comically. They'd seen everything you've had to throw at them. But no one would expect to see you with a chopped off wing, no legs, and a gaping wound through your entire torso. That'd be a first.

 

     “All right, can you feel this?” asks Jade, poking the end of your wing slightly. The needles she's already threaded are waiting on the tray.

      You shake your head. Your wing and torso are dead numb, but so is most of you. “I think you may have... maybe... used too much,” you reply, each word an effort.

      “Well, the amount I used was for someone who has a normal human weight. You're throwing me off with your lack of legs and bird wings and being all 'non-organic,'” teases Jade.

      “Sorry for being... uh... a... medical anomalilly.”

      “Anomaly?”

      “Thassit,” you nod.

      Jade frowns. “Geez, you're really losing it.”

      “I'm be fine... just... do your thing or... whatever....”

      She places a hand on the underside of your right wing. “Works for me. Just don't make any sudden movements.”

      “'Kay... but no promises.”

 

      You pass out as soon as she begins.

 

      Jade is humming lowly when you wake up, some escaped hairs from her bun falling in front of her face as she works on your stomach gash. You turn to look at your wing. It's stitched shut, but you can't control your muscles well enough to make it move. It looks a lot better. Jade is completely preoccupied. When you try to lift yourself up by the elbows, she looks up at you with wide eyes.

      “Oh! Wow, hi. You only slept for less than an hour.”

      “Really?” Though you still can't feel much, you're feeling a lot less dizzy. Maybe your sprite body reacts to medication differently, as she suggested.

      “Yup! This is going by quicker than I thought it would. I don't know how to explain it, but your skin is kind of... easier to suture, I guess. It has sort of a different texture.”

      “Are you sayin' I'm silky smooth. Because I'll accept the compliment.”

      “Look at you, speaking clearly again.”

      “Yeah, you thought you could rid yourself of my charming company by drugging me, but you were ignorant to the fact that I always come back better and sassier than ever.”

      Jade smirks. “Now, why would I ever want to do that?” Her progress has left her a few inches above your belly button. You're glad you weren't awake when she started.

      “You tell me, Jade. Some people get a load of my startlingly refreshing personality and they can't handle it. They're like, 'hey hey hey, whoa, you can't just come in here with all this delightful charisma. We're gonna have to knock you the fuck out now. Teach you a lesson. Oh, by the way, are you afraid of needles?'”

      Jade lowers her face, and you can't see whether she's still smiling. She works efficiently, cross-stitching your skin with hands that don't linger for long before they've moved on. She's already progressed by more than an inch during your short exchange. A few more bags of surgical needles are on the table now, all ripped open the exact same way. She must have left while you were asleep to alchemize more.

      “No answer, huh? I knew it. I can't believe I'm a victim of medical malpractice.”

      “You can call yourself whatever you want,” hums Jade. “But I really didn't mean to knock you out. I like talking to you.”

      It's a relief she hasn't reached your chest yet – you'd drop dead if she could feel how high your heart rate just jumped. Jade's fingers seem to curl up when you don't respond right away.

      “Oh. Well. That makes total sense.”

      Jade snorts through her nose, finishing a stitch and pulling the thread up so high that it tugs on your skin. It doesn't hurt, but you flinch anyway. She recoils, looking at you apologetically.

      “Sorry!”

      “It's okay, I'm basically subjected to this kind of sadism every day,” you reply. You thought it was obvious you were kidding, but she looks hurt.

      “I'm not trying to hurt you,” she says in a near whisper, dog ears flattening. Her eyes are tinged with pink – was she crying while you were blacked out? You look at each other for a couple seconds before you have to turn away, focusing on the tiled pattern of the floor.

      “Yeah. I know, sorry.”

 

      You clean up nicely. The rest of the procedure breezes by, the last half feeling like some sort of fucked up acupuncture session. When Jade finishes, you can't stop running your fingers along the stitches. Your irritated skin rises up a bit, and the texture weirds you out. You're pleased as punch that you won't have to sit still and wait for them all to be snipped once they're ready to be taken out. But it's a shame you don't have any more shirts. Even if you did, you'd only ruin them by trying to cut wing holes in them. You just don't want to look at the stitches each time you glance down, nor do you want to broadcast their presence to everyone you pass. You'll be putting on a freak show for a while.

      At least you don't feel like you're dying anymore. The feverish sweat you'd developed has all but disappeared. And you're snug as a bug in a rug with this new gauze – now you're just a regular Halloween mummy. Little blots of yellow blood are already showing through; you'll have to come back here every now and then to change them out. All of this is strange comfort to you – even though you're not sure you can be classified as human anymore, at least you can hurt and bleed like a normal person. Most people wouldn't survive a sword ripping through their entire torso, though. You're still a total weirdo in that case.

 

      The odor of plastic and iodoform continues to linger. You both sit in silence for a bit, you hunched over on the edge of the bed and her leaning against the sink counter with her ankles crossed. Now that the distraction is over, Jade seems less present. You look at her with your head hung low, but it's unlikely she'll catch you staring. Her eyes are unfocused, staring at nothing in particular. She's pulled her bun out as well; maybe she thinks her hair is obscuring how suddenly miserable she appears.

      “Jade.”

      She blinks, taking a second to recognize your voice. When she turns to look at you, her eyelids are drooping heavily. She looks like she just woke up.

      “Thanks for doing this. I know it took up a lot of your time, so... yeah.”

      Jade rubs the back of her neck, fingers digging through her curls of hair. “It's the least I could do. You don't need to thank me.”

      “Jade.”

      “Hm.”

      “I'm sorry.”

      Jade closes her eyes, reaching for the bridge of her nose with one hand. She looks away, but you hear the quietest of sniffs anyway.

      “I'm sorry,” you repeat. “I panicked. I didn't know what to do. I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.”

      Jade keeps her head turned away, her shoulders trembling just barely. You can't blame her for not responding; you'd sooner cut a finger off than let her or anyone see you cry. With a bit of effort, you push yourself up from the bed and drift over to Jade, pausing a couple feet from her. She wipes her eyes quickly with the top of her hand.

      “I thought I'd never hear from you again,” she whispers, voice cracking.

      You want to force a smile and joke about how anybody else would say that with disappointment, but you figure that'd make her feel worse. “I couldn't get away with that. You'd pounce on me eventually, all boppin' me with a rolled up newspaper and asking what sort of time I call this.”

      A small smile flashes across Jade's face. “Probably, yeah.” She crosses her arms across her chest.

      “I gotta tell you though, it sucks spending all your time alone even if you have like, one person to talk to. I couldn't maintain the same lifestyle while cutting down to zero friends.”

      Jade wipes a palm across one of her wet cheeks. “I know. But it didn't stop me from being afraid anyway.”

 

      Both of you look at the ground. You're not sure there's any other direction this line of conversation could lead, so you decide to jump in headfirst.

      “Tell me what happened.”

      Jade's eyes flicker with a film of tears. She pushes her glasses up, nodding slightly. “All right. I suppose that's fair. But can we not do it in here?”

 

      The room _does_ smell like shit, and it doesn't help that it's bright as hell either. Where else could you invite her to talk about her horrifying trauma, other than the near pitch black of the boiler rooms?

      “Yeah. We can go to my room.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanted bro to walk out of a bojangles because i think their name is really delightful but they dont have it in texas, i guess


	7. Chapter 7

      Davesprite's room is dark even with one of the lights flipped on. It's completely unmarked by his presence other than a stray sprite pendant and a mess of old feathers on one of the beds. He apologizes profusely when you walk in behind him, shaking his sheets out and sprinkling the metal floor with a flurry of orange. It seems a bit of a pain for him to do so; bending over is an effort with his injuries, though you're proud of how well you were able to reverse the damage. You shift your weight by the closed door while he tries to explain the state of his room.

 

      “I haven't been in here for a while,” he says hurriedly, smoothing his flipped-over sheets with his palms. “Uh... yeah, this is good enough. Do you wanna sit down?”

      Your fingers fidget in front of your stomach. “Sure.”

      Even though this place barely gives the sense of belonging to anyone, you still feel like an intruder as you sit on the edge of his bed. The room was set up for two soldiers; there's another bed just above your heads. Davesprite lowers himself tentatively beside you. By his fidgeting you can tell he wants you to start your story right away, but you don't know how. Anything you say can and will be used against you.

 

      “I don't think anyone but John... could really tell you what happened,” you falter, staring at the folded hands on your lap. Your voice cracks a bit when you say your brother's name. Like trying to pronounce a foreign word, it lodges in your throat and refuses to come out right. “All I can really explain is what happened afterward.”

      Davesprite leans forward, propping himself up on his forearms. “It's cool. Whatever you're okay talking about.”

      “I know you probably expect a more detailed account, and I wish I could do that, but I–”

      “It's fine,” he insists, an abrupt snip steps away from a crow's caw.

      “Well....”

      You lean back and stare at the frame of the bed above you. Hums and clunks echo through the battleship walls, and the dim space flickers with flashes of bright yellow and green that fleck the pseudo-sky outside. You blink back stinging tears; it's not a good time to cry, and you don't want to make Davesprite feel worse. So you will yourself to take a breath and start from the beginning.

      “He asked me to send him to his house for a while. I knew that he would want to be alone... so much happened over that one day. It didn't seem real yet, that none of this would ever go back to how it was.”

      John's life lost all normalcy after the game, while the changes brought on for you were almost an upgrade – at least you aren't alone anymore. But you know it devastated John to be here much more than he would ever let on.

      “Hmm,” Davesprite grunts, a small acknowledgment that he's listening.

      “It's very hard, preventing myself from just... _seeing_ everything with Bec's sight. Each point contained in this area of space is visible within a fraction of a second if I don't force myself not to see. That's what I had been doing. I was just leaving him alone.” You run a hand through your hair. “It seemed like the nice thing to do.”

      Davesprite rests his forehead in his palm. “Yeah, that makes sense. Being nice is your thing, isn't it.” You can't tell whether he's being sarcastic.

      “It was irreversible before I could even turn around. The planet just... ruptured from the inside. The tectonic plates were already turning to ash.” You shut your eyes tight, that horrible sound still in your head, like someone had taken a huge egg and bashed it open on the ground. “He was already dead. And then it all just... burned up.”

     “So it started from inside,” he mutters to himself, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

     “Yes."

     “Those planets... they don't have normal cores. There's lava and shit, but it ain't like Earth. They're full of tunnels that the denizen lives in.”

      “I know.” You've already seen a good portion of what lies within LOFAF's crust, all ancient labyrinthine tunnels leading to the heart of Echidna's lair. The path to Hephaestus' den is even more arduous, filled with fire pits and magma rivers from what you've glimpsed. “I couldn't tell you, though... whether his denizen had anything to do with it.”

      “He had to have done it,” whispers Davesprite, perhaps trying to convince himself more than you. “Nothing else could ever make that happen.”

      “But why would Typheus destroy his own planet?” you wonder, fingers fidgeting. “Why would he wait until John was back there?”

      “That's the big question, isn't it,” replies Davesprite. “His denizen never went that far in my timeline. LOWAS stayed behind even after John... didn't make it back. So it's not like he went picking a fight with him and lost. Denizens don't work that way.” He pushes his aviators up. “Maybe they just have different attitudes. But Hephaestus never tried to bomb his own house when we met. I don't know.”

      “Echidna made me promise her that I would bring the planets safely into the new session,” you murmur, leaning into yourself. “I have no idea whether she'll understand... whenever it is that she wakes up. Maybe she'll think I went back on our contract. Maybe she'll implode LOFAF, too.”

      You're surprised when Davesprite suddenly swats the side of your leg with the top of his hand. “Don't say that,” he snaps. “No one else is allowed to explode on my watch.”

      “Sorry. It's been an effort not to be morbid.”

      “Ditto.”

 

      You open your palms, the edges of your fingers gleaming chartreuse. “I tried, you know. Please believe me... I really tried to piece LOWAS back together. It's within my power, to rearrange atoms, to shift the forms they take. But everything was destroyed in the chemical reactions. Nothing recognizable could ever be made from what was left.”

      Davesprite exhales, straightening up and resting his hands behind him. “Well, I can't say I understand what it means to be a space sorceress with atom-splitting powers, so I won't even try to argue against that. But I believe you. Thanks for trying, anyway.” His tone is almost nonchalant, like you're only apologizing for failing to complete an errand.

 

      “Trying isn't good enough.” You hold your face in your hands, strands of hair tickling you as they fall forward. The urge to sob makes your chest ache, straining your words into a near rasp. “You don't understand. I spent so long preparing for that day. Everything I ever did was to make sure that when it all came to pass, we would win. I thought we finally had. And now it's all slipped through my fingers.” Your body could concave from the sheer weight of your defeat.

      Davesprite gives no reply. His mouth is set in what could be interpreted as a scowl if you couldn't distinguish it from grief. There seems no better time to ask the question that's been eating at you for days.

     “Davesprite?”

     He turns slowly, and through the dark lenses you can see the whites of his eyes.

     “Is this a doomed timeline?”

     The air seems to deflate from his chest. He grabs the front of his hair, talons raking through the kinks. “I don't know,” he sighs. “I just don't know.

 

      Does anything you do from here on out matter? For a fleeting moment you're a balloon with its string clipped, nothing but the air pressure far above keeping you from drifting as high as you want. You shiver with the strength of that feeling, a reckless abandon approaching the deadly. What would you be capable of if you knew without a shadow of a doubt that this timeline is going nowhere? Could you simply let go of the battleship, allowing it to free fall into the void until you all go up in a blaze of neon green? Your potential for destruction is overwhelming.

 

      “What do you do when you know your timeline is doomed?” you ask. It's a risky question. Davesprite's jaw twitches, and you're afraid you've crossed a line.

      “In my case, you rack up as much intel that'll help until you can go back and stop the same shit from happening,” he considers, scratching behind an ear. “But I'm not at a point where that's still an option. I can't... y'know. I can't time travel anymore.”

      “Right.”

      His left wing flutters a bit, the long feathers whispering across the sheets behind you. “But now, I guess... I don't know. Make amends with the people you still have left. Hope that you don't disappear before you see how this timeline is meant to end. Try not to fling yourself off a cliff. It's been a while since I read _Doomed Timelines for Dummies_ , so I'm rusty on the material.”

      “Oh.”

 

      You've spent nearly the entirety of your life sitting and waiting, only occasionally orchestrating the events you knew would help ease your friends into the reality of SBURB. Passivity is a dish you've grown sick of – can you stand to wait for three more years? And for what, to see the loathing in your friends' faces when you tell them you've let John die? Are you capable of that kind of patience? Bile rises in your throat.

 

      Davesprite clears his throat, dragging you out from under the weight of your thoughts. “While we're at it... you know, apologizing for everything we've ever done wrong. I'm sorry I never contacted you during the session.”

      You blink. He picks up when you don't respond, his tone more self-assured.

      “I talked to everyone except you. At least until you... ascended, or whatever. I couldn't get away with not talking to John, since the whole reason I came back was to prevent his dumb ass from getting boiled alive. And I needed to make sure Rose could remember the old timeline, because that was part of our plan.” He rubs his neck. “You died, too. In my timeline. But John would've saved you from that if I could just tell him not to fucking _go_ anywhere, that we still needed him –” Davesprite cuts off suddenly, covering his mouth with one hand.

      “I don't even know what I'm trying to get across,” he breathes. “I should have taken at least a minute to ask after you. But it would have been a disaster. 'Oh hey, Jade, how are you feeling? Did you know your computer exploded in my timeline and we just had to assume you were wiped out by meteors?”

      “A lot of things were going on. I can't blame you for having other things to do.” You don't know what else you could possibly say – it feels wrong to assume you know how he feels, though you may soon enough.

      “That's the thing, though. I stopped being useful to alpha Dave before I had been prototyped more than two hours. After I completed LOHAC's quest, there was nothing else I had to do. But instead I decided to fight Jack with my bro. _That_ turned out to be a totally awesome and non-traumatic experience,” he scoffs.

      You pull your legs up, folding them on the edge of the bed. Your right knee brushes Davesprite's tail, and he relaxes a bit.

      “You don't want to hear all this,” he sighs. “Sorry for unloading. But I felt bad about it. And that was even before I felt bad about ignoring you for the past... however many days it's been.”

      “I forgive you,” you murmur. “It's easier to forgive not getting a few messages than it is for pretty much everything I'm responsible for now.”

      Davesprite balls his fists, grabbing the thin sheets between his fingers. “It won't happen again. I promise.”

      You close your eyes, and the hot tears that you've been suppressing finally slip through your defenses. A couple drops land on your hand, but you don't check if he's watching you.

 

      It finally occurs to you that Davesprite is your only friend. If you live to see the new session, you cannot fathom how much you'll be hated. The full force of your dread crushes you.

 

      The boilers kick off for a few minutes, and the room becomes silent. You allow the tears to flow as they will, because they come so often and so without warning and it makes you so tired to pretend that you don't want to break down and bawl at any given moment. Gradually, cautiously, Davesprite puts his arm around you.

      You rest your head on his shoulder. A chemical smell lingers on him. “So, what now?”

      “Make the most of it, I guess.”

 

     You let your tears drain the scraps of energy you have left, and before you know it's happening you've fallen asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im sprinkling a bunch of vague and subtle references to other media in some of these chapters and if you guess them correctly you dont win anything but the knowledge that i am nodding slowly at your comment


	8. Chapter 8

      Why does this keep happening to you? Did you win a raffle you didn't know about that allows you to experience an endless string of awkward and tense interactions? Is Ashton Kutcher waiting in your closet for you to finally scream in absolute exasperation? Like, Jade chose _here_ , your grody-ass excuse for a bedroom of all places, to conk out for the night. That is just the bee's knees. The cat's pajamas. The... fuck, whatever.

 

      It's not that you're pissed about it, really. If anything you feel like a homemaker who's upset that the neighbors arrived for the dinner party before you could finish your garden vinaigrette. You didn't realize she was asleep until her breathing slowed, and even then you weren't convinced until her head slipped off your shoulder and she slumped backward across the bed, almost squashing your good wing and drawing a squawk out of you before you could sweep it out of her way. Is it even an appropriate hour for her to be sleeping? Since you don't have your phone anymore, you have no clue what time it is. But Jade never abided by a reasonable sleep schedule anyway, so maybe you shouldn't ask questions.

      The look on her face is disheartening. Jade's eyebrows are knit together in worry or fear, one of them twitching. Her hair falls in front of her mouth, so you can't get a good read into her expression. But she's fast asleep all right, already rolled onto her side with her arms tucked into her chest. She looks dramatically less like a radioactive space dog who throws heavenly bodies around like nothing, and more like just a normal, scared kid.

      You'd feel like the biggest douche in the asscrack of pseudo-reality to leave her alone after _just_ promising to stop ditching her. But you're sure as hell not sleeping on the floor with your sore stitches. And the bed above you is too close to the ceiling, built and arranged for slight chess people rather than humans with obscene wingspans and delicate injuries to accommodate. So you try to settle around her.

 

      It takes a while to get comfortable. Your wounds complain each time you shift your position. Finally you lay on your left shoulder, a tentative balance keeping the weight off your stitches. You stretch your left wing out as far as it will go until the primaries brush the metal of the headboard. Jade lies less than two feet from you, and although she is fast asleep you are still trying to avert eye contact. Having her here is the perfect combination of confusing, uncomfortable, and exciting. You never had friends over to your apartment in Houston, so this is a strange first. You can't bring yourself to do anything but stare past the edges of her black hair. She isn't even awake to look at you, and yet you feel compelled to maintain the appearance of the Dave she expects.

 

      Today would rank pretty high in your personal list of most emotionally strenuous days, right behind the first time you lived through April 13th and the time when you were six and Bro told you the tooth fairy was coming for all your teeth with a sledgehammer because you weren't giving her enough of them to eat. It's a constant, conscious effort to keep up the snappy persona Jade is accustomed to. You've gotten scarcely a break from it since you prototyped yourself, even from yourself – Dave expected someone who mirrored himself at that point in time, not some bitter sad sack who kept thinking about what it might be like to jump into the lava sea.

      You would have wanted to kick your own ass if you were in Dave's position. For a while you tried to convince yourself that your chill and your joking were genuine – it's painful to admit when you've changed for the worse. He must have seen through you, towards the end. He must have seen the resentment that boiled beneath you, not because he had taken your place as the alpha but because he would never have to live through the grief you've carried. The only one who understood was your sister, but Rose's memories of you are vague, maybe due to the nature of the shift, but maybe because she was probably hungover when you reversed.

      You didn't even know what to do with yourself in the moments you were alone, whether it was carrying out Hephaestus' quest or drifting through Skaia's black and white battlefield. What good would it do to cry, to scream? You couldn't even kick anything over, for Christ's sake. How do you begin to cope with your temporal irrelevancy, to make sense of the arbitrary trauma inflicted upon you by the nature of the game? Even if you _did_ manage to begin venting, would you be able to stop before you've laid all your emotions out bare and raw, nothing left to hide behind?

     There's no better time than now to see what would happen if you let the whole house of cards collapse. That is, if the timeline is still standing by the time you can force out a more than superficially honest statement about your feelings.

 

      Jade's chest rises, and a quiet sigh escapes through her teeth. Her hands are clasped to her breast, as if she's holding something she doesn't want you to see. At least her eyebrows have relaxed a bit – now she simply looks mournful. The tracks of tears that have dried on her face are barely visible. You start to lift your hand to brush the hair from her face, an absentminded reflex that you have to suppress.

      Your hand falls back to the bed, and one of Jade's ears flicks. In the dark green lighting from the window, she could almost pass for Jadesprite.

 

      You can tell it embarrasses Jade to cry so openly. Her humiliation is understandable after what Jadesprite told you of their brief interaction. If you merely _suspected_ that Dave hated you, at least Jade was upfront about it with her sprite counterpart. Perhaps crying makes her feel like a hypocrite.

      Meeting Jadesprite was the most bizarre social encounter you've ever had. You didn't know what Jade looked like at all – when you saw the green sprite from the back, it looked like maybe someone had prototyped a dog with a Barbie doll. She jumped when she heard the scrape of your talons on your sword's hilt, her eyes wide as though expecting someone much more dangerous than yourself. You made eye contact for what felt like a full minute, her neon tears flickering as she stared. It didn't click that she was Jade until she said your name. What other option did you have than to play it off? There she was, Jade Harley, your childhood friend responsible for every relationship you've ever valued, and she was a sprite. You thought she was stunning. And then she was gone – vanished save for the parts salvageable enough to be recycled.

 

      You're lifted from the haze of your memories by a distinctive smell that finally reaches you. It's earthy, like saltwater and soil. You wouldn't dare get closer to see if it's Jade, but it has to be her. How has the scent survived after your hours of swimming in hospital stench? It's like something they would sell as a fragrance for laundry detergent, along with a corny name like “Island Breeze” next to a picture of a palm tree and a split-open coconut. You'd like to compliment her about it when she wakes up, to lift her spirits just an inch. But you can't think of a smooth way to tell someone they smell like dirt. So you lie with your hands folded like bird's feet gripped to a perch, your anxious heart pounding and your wounds throbbing and the smell of the ocean in your nostrils.

      If Jade stays here all night, you may have an aneurysm before you can get to sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 18 April, 2009

 

      You are going to make a new friend today, and you are _so_ excited. Not just any new friend either; you've waited many years to talk to this one. It's weird to consider that you aren't already friends – after all, a friend is someone you talk to and visit all the time, right? You think your soon-to-be new pal fits the bill in that respect. Maybe that means you will become friends faster than normal!

 

      Bec snuffles at your ankles and jumps up after you as you climb onto your bed, opening your lunchtop and letting the holographic screen envelop the two of you. He yawns, revealing bright white fangs and a chartreuse tongue before curling up in front of you and resting his head on your leg. You scritch Bec's ears as you open Pesterchum, a program you only downloaded a couple days ago. Most of yesterday went into perfecting what your “chumhandle” would be – it's important to make a good first impression. You think the end result is pretty cool. You're not too sure what a “Gnostic” is, but you've seen it in the roleplaying forums you frequent, and it seemed fairly mystical. Fitting, since your imminent conversation came to you from one of Skaia's many oracle clouds.

      Among the visions that you've seen recently from your bedroom window was a flash of your own computer screen, a window open to a chat client you've heard of once or twice before. The image disappeared after only a couple seconds, and you deciphered the letters in blue before you could read your supposed response. It had to be him – the name was a perfect match. A cobalt ponytail holder has been on your right thumb since you woke up that day, reminding you to “pester” him at the time you saw in the cloud. Now, that time is almost upon you. Tinkering with the unfamiliar program allows you to finally open a new chat window. You tap “ghostyTrickster” into the contact bar with shaking fingers, backspacing and retyping each time a jittery index hits the wrong key. Bec lifts his head when your keyboard brushes his ear. He sniffs your trembling hands and snaps at one of them.

      “Ack! Stop that, Bec. Bad puppy.”

      Becquerel grumbles and flops onto his back.

 

      Where will this conversation lead you? You hope you find the right words to say. It comes easily to you with regards to befriending Prospitians – they're easygoing, quiet, and already inclined to like you as the princess of their moon. But another human is a completely different matter. You've talked to some people online, but only in passing. The stakes are higher this time.

      You should start with a simple introduction, be friendly, tell him your name... then what? What if he doesn't want to talk to you? He always seems so upset in his dreams, his face somewhere between irritation and fear. Is he grumpy when he's awake, too?

      You know your fears are unfounded – you've kept his letter and his kind words and his promises of future friendship neatly folded in your chest for years so you can read it when you're feeling particularly lonely. Though you've never spoken to each other, you know he will come to care for you. And if only he knew how much you already care for him!

      Just take a deep breath and relax. From here on out, you are not alone.

 

 

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 10:41 --

GG: hi my name is jade!!!!

 

 

     When you open your eyes, you are out of breath and completely disoriented.

     It's still startling, waking to the complete absence of the ocean's roar outside your window. You expect a breeze wafting in, spreading the salty scent of the sea with it. But as you blink in the green light that filters into your dim room, you can only smell the tangy metal of the walls and a lingering tinge of iodoform. You take a piece of your hair between your fingers and sniff – yup, that's you.

     When did you get back to your room? You rack your brain, but can't remember coming here at all. Slowly, you push yourself upright and inhale with a sharp hiss when you see that Davesprite is sitting by your window.

 

     Your waking goes unnoticed. Davesprite has plucked one of your succulents from the porthole ledge, a tiny blooming cactus in a pot you painted with sloppy blue polka dots when you were smaller. He rotates it in his hands, testing the tiny spines with two fingertips. A faint bassline floats across the room, and your Bec-ears tune in. Oh, that's why he can't hear you – he's listening to _your_ iPod. The end of his sprite tail bobs almost like a foot.

     You comb your fingers through your hair, tangled into knots since you didn't pull it back before you fell asleep. Picking out a tangle towards the bottom of your hair, you stare past Davesprite and see that he's brought what looks like a breakfast tray with him. It's made of shiny yellow plastic, a couple plates still on it. It looks like half of it's been eaten. Your stomach whines, and you're surprised – you haven't felt hungry for the better part of the week, skipping meals and deliberately avoiding the kitchen for fear that Nanna will burst out to chase you down. She may very well thump you over the head the next time you see her.

     Maybe she sent this to your room with Davesprite, a passive reminder that humans need to eat on a regular basis. Maybe she thinks it'll make you feel better. You haven't talked to her like you said you would. Another day, another apology to make.

 

     Davesprite stretches to set the cactus back with its companions, talons scraping one of the rusted bolts. The sound sets your teeth on edge. When he turns from the porthole, you make eye contact. He starts a bit, his feathery ruff fluffing up.

     “Oh. Hey, you woke up.” Davesprite pulls your earbuds out sheepishly, coiling them up and resting them on his lap.

     “Looks like it,” you rasp, throat clogged with sleep. You swallow to get rid of the chemical taste in your mouth. Being in the medical ward really gunked you up.

     “Uh, your grandma told me to give you this,” he says, jerking a thumb to the yellow tray. “Just so you know, I already ate a lot of it. Sorry.”

     “I thought she might have,” you sigh, sweeping your hand over the bedsheets for your glasses. You find them under a blanket you've kicked on top of them, putting them on slowly and reassessing the room in clearer detail. You can see now that the tray had a pile of French toast sticks on them. One of them is half-eaten. “Thanks for burglarizing my breakfast.”

     “No problem,” Davesprite sniffs.

     “Did she seem mad?” you ask, rubbing the back of your neck. “Like, about anything at all?”

     He tilts his head from side to side. “Nah. She was surprisingly upbeat for someone whose... hm. I guess she's just immune to fucked up shit.”

     “It's only that I haven't talked to her in a few days. I thought she might be angry with me. Or disappointed. Which might be even worse, really.”

     “I wouldn't worry about it.” Davesprite pops the other half of the partially-eaten stick in his mouth. “Actually, she wanted to talk to you to pretty bad.”

     “Really?”

     “Yeah. Didn't want to be pushy though.” He doesn't continue until he's swallowed. “Kept making sure I would bring this to you. She was goin' on and on about how you were gonna 'go out like a light.' That's the exact phrase she used. 'If that poor girl doesn't eat she's going to go out like a light.'”

     “Great impression.”

     “I know.”

     “So you listened to her lecture about how I was going to pass out. And then decided to eat it all.”

     “Okay, I didn't eat it _all_ , but–”

     “Davesprite....”

      He shrugs. “I don't know what to tell ya. Like, I don't even digest food anymore, y'know? It just gets zapped. There is literally nothing going on here,” he says, patting his stomach. “But I can't sit here for hours waiting for you to wake up while all this fucking food is just sitting in front of me.”

      “And I bet you couldn't help yourself from messing with my iPod, either,” you jab.

      “Tch....” Davesprite takes the iPod in his palm and tosses it back to you underhanded. You snatch the length of the cord, pulling it towards you and setting it on the table next to the bed.

      “I wanted to know what time it was,” he mumbles.

      “Did you also want to rock out?” You mimic the action of playing your bass, and he bursts into laughter.

      “Yeah, that too. Hey, no offense, but why do you have so many anime openings on there?”

      “Why _don't_ you have a lot of anime openings?” you retort, sticking your tongue out.

      “Touché. Now, can you please take these away from me? I'm gonna end up eating them all if you keep enabling me.”

      “All right, all right....”

      You zap the platter across the room to your lap, but as you look down at what's left you can't bring yourself to eat. Though your stomach growls, it's a nauseous sort of hunger that makes you feel sick at the sight of food. The second plate on the tray is completely cleaned save for a few crumbs. At least the French toast is still sort of warm.

      “What was on this?” you ask, pointing at the plate Davesprite vacuumed up.

      “Uh, like, bacon or something. I don't know, I sorta ate it indiscriminately.”

      “How in the world is she making this stuff?”

      “Top notch alchemizing skills,” he replies, tapping out a beat on the side of his chair. “In which skills is spelled with a 'z' at the end. Sprites got mad knowledge of how the game equipment works.”

      “I see. So you're predisposed to understand the outcomes of combining and rearranging base materials.”

      “Something like that.” Davesprite cocks his head. “Well, I don't know how you would alchemize bacon, actually. But she figured it out pretty fast. Grandmas have that supernatural inclination to feed everyone within a mile radius, even in post-apocalyptic scenarios.” He tosses his palms up. “I'm relying on grandma stereotypes here. It's actually pretty weird to have, like... adults providing you with food.”

      “Yeah. It really is.”

      You pick up a piece of toast. It shames you to know that Nanna has been asking after you, or that she doesn't even harbor any anger towards you at all. It isn't as though her grief is lesser than yours – how must it feel to have lost two children in two days? It isn't right to leave her to mourn. Your chest hurts to think of her marching on, head held high, returning to her self-imposed quest to keep every living creature on the battleship fed. You're even less hungry than before.

      “Are you gonna eat that or what?” asks Davesprite.

      You blink. “I'm not sure. I'm not very hungry.”

      “Pssh.” He leans back in his chair, the front legs rising off the ground. “Yeah, like you've eaten at all in the past few days.”

      “No, I haven't.” You rest your forehead in your hands. “I don't know what's wrong with me. But I just don't feel that I can eat right now.”

      “Well, you'd better. I'll huff and puff my feathers up and make a classic bird mess of this place.”

      “ _Noooo_ ,” you complain, groaning to the ceiling.

      “Believe me, I know how those little fuckers work on account of being one. All hoppin' into my room when I'm not lookin', then comin' back to see they've tossed literally everything that wasn't bolted down onto the floor. Got my homework all over the place. What's page one and what's page four? Good luck finding out, fucker.”

      “You can't seriously blame me for not being hungry.”

      “Can't I, though.”

      “ _Ugh_. It's not like I'm lying.”

      “Jade, alls I know is that I will throw those godforsaken breakfast sticks at your face if you don't eat them right now.”

      “Well, that's just a waste of food.”

      Davesprite puts his arm behind the back of his chair, his face softening. “I'm sure dying of starvation isn't heroic or just, but I do not intend to find out. Please eat.”

      “All right. Sorry.”

 

      He ends up swiping several more sticks of toast from you anyway, swooping aimlessly around the room while you chat about nothing. When the plate is clean, you click the screen of your iPod on and see that it's almost noon. Davesprite settles on the corner of your bed, leaning against one of its posts. His stomach gauze will need to be replaced today. He stretches his good wing out, and the smell of iodoform floats from the feathers. A question occurs to you.

      “Davesprite?”

      “Yup.”

      “How did I end up back here?”

      He blushes a bright yellow that almost glows, turning his head away. “Uh... you fell asleep in my room, but I thought it was too gross in there.”

      “So...?"

      “So... I carried you back here. Not too long after you conked out.”

      “Oh.” Your cheeks warm. You know you have a habit of falling asleep at inconvenient times, but passing out in someone else's room – after _crying_ yourself to sleep, no less – is a new low. “Sorry, then.”

      “It happens.”

      You sit for a while, listening to the boilers kick on and fill the walls with their mechanical humming.

      “Hey Jade?”

      “Hm.”

      “Can I... have my phone back?”

      You tilt your head, perplexed. “I don't... I don't have it.”

      “No, I mean....” Davesprite squeezes the bridge of his nose. “I kinda left it behind in one of the rooms around here. I don't know which one. Could you maybe... reappearify it?”

      You close your eyes, and within seconds of flashing green you pinpoint its location. It sits up high in a closet somewhere in the captain's quarters, its battery lying beside it. Oh. That's why he wouldn't answer you. It's almost invisible in the shadowy corners of the shelf, like it was tossed up there without a second thought. With a heavy heart, the phone warps into your hands. You click the battery back inside, then hand it across the bed. Two of his rough fingers brush yours when he accepts it. Davesprite holds the power button down. Pesterchum immediately squalls with a number of chat notifications, and you feel your face redden.

      “Oh, my god, I'm _so_ sorry.” You hold your face in your hands, cheeks burning. “Please delete those logs, I don't even remember most of what I said.”

      You don't know how many messages the phone tells Davesprite he has, but his mouth hangs open at whatever the final count is. “Uh. Yeah, sure, if that's what you want.”

      “It is. _Please_ just delete it.”

      “All right, I'm on it.”

      With a couple of clicks and beeps from his screen, the textual evidence of your absolute meltdown is wiped from existence. “There,” Davesprite says. “Gone. Better?”

      “Much.”

      He turns his phone off, tossing it to the center of the sheets by your iPod. He holds his hands to his gut, grazing the fabric of his bandages. “Don't feel bad about sending any of those,” he says. “It's my fault for not responding. Maybe we'd both be better off right now if I hadn't deserted.”

      You lean back and rest your head against the wall. “It was a pretty crazy few days. You wouldn't have wanted to deal with me.”

      “Same.”

      It's hard to tell whether he's looking at you, or if he's just staring at the sheets. You run your fingers through your hair.

      “Well, now instead of three days, we have three _years_ to deal with each other.”

      Davesprite snorts, and with a small grunt he leans forward to offer you a fistbump. “Hell yeah. You are gonna get _so_ dealt with.”

      You complete the bump, a scratchy affair due to the plates on his fingers. “I can't wait to be a piece of shit all day and deal with this emotional baggage.”

      “Damn, you just keep pulling the rug out from under me,” he snickers.

      “It's part of getting dealt with.”

 

      It cheers you to draw a laugh out of him. You can tell he tries very hard to maintain the stoicism that inhabits his every feature, but it comes as second nature to make him slip into elusive smiles. It's a small comfort, to think you're still capable of making someone happy.

      His quiet laugh is infectious, and you break into a peal of giggling. Confused, Davesprite's laughter hardens, and in seconds you are both rolling on the sheets with bellyaching howls. Tears spring to the corners of your eyes. You continue like this for a time, eventually panning out into deep breaths and scattered guffaws. The two of you lie diagonally across the bed, the tip of one of your ears brushing Davesprite's hair.

      “What... were we laughing about?” Davesprite asks between breaths.

      “I don't know."

      Your stomach hurts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the best part of waking up is horrible guilt and anguish in your cup  
> the pesterlog quip is ripped from the flash where karkat is like, viewing johns childhood. i dont know. you know what i mean.
> 
> EDIT 12/18/15: added an illustration! jades wallpaper, if u didnt already know from canon, is "the ancient keeper" by vampireprincess007 on deviantart


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realized partway through writing this chapter that jades house got added onto during the session, and i would have rewritten it if i hadnt already implied that the house needed to be 'fixed' back in, what, chapter three? so like... its already canon divergent, just roll with me here, okay?

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 20 April, 2009

 

     Your life is shaping up to become what _Groundhog Day_ would have been if Bill Murray was a mutilated ghost with crow DNA. At times you forget that any of this is real, that this is _definitely_ happening without any chance of being fixed. Only Jade's presence ensures that you don't permanently slip out of lucidity, left staring at the ceiling for the next one thousand and eighty-eight days as you wait for the timeline to swallow you whole. She hasn't commented on the fact that you've scarcely left her side in over two days. You may as well be _her_ spirit guide now, if the surrealist spatial plane you're in qualifies as being part of SBURB. A deeply rooted terror keeps you glued to her side as her feathery orange shadow.

     Jade's demeanor has cooled like lava now that the first chaotic days are behind you, white-hot grief still visible in thin cracks underneath the dull surface. You wouldn't get your hopes up far enough to presume that your neediness is mutual, but she hasn't banished you to your own room yet. Maybe she isn't familiar enough with society to understand that it's frowned upon to have a boy sleep in your room. Or maybe she's only tolerating you out of obligation. Even if it turned out that she simply pitied you, you don't think you'd care. You'd continue to cling to the perch for fear of toppling away in the wind.

 

     By now you've been enrolled in the crash course on relearning face-to-face human interaction. Much like any work you've ever turned in for a grade, a professional might say that you have potential, you just aren't applying yourself. But at least you're a pleasure to have in class.

     There were days at a time during your timeline where you didn't speak at all, your throat closing up in such a way that you had to swallow and cough for a minute before anything came out. As the weeks rolled on, your planning sessions with Rose devolved from convoluted verbal fencing into small grunts and hums of acknowledgment as you went over each others game notes. It was easier to let Pesterchum handle the mess for you; you didn't have to blink back your frustrated tears or put the mental focus into stringing together a greater than five-word sentence. After a while you even stopped talking to yourself. The only thing that drew words out of you every now and then was Calsprite's meddling – usually along the lines of “fuck off,” “get the hell out of there,” or “go to Muppet hell already you plush piece of shit.” When you returned to April 13th, your throat was sore for the better part of the day, run ragged from speaking far longer than you were accustomed to for four months (or one year).

     Now you find that talking in person is different than you remember. It may have something to do with how Jade actually means what she says, no mind games or flaming hoops of irony through which to backflip. It's still a Herculean task to approach the level of sincerity with which she addresses you. So instead you keep the filler material bubbling forth to keep her face lit with even fleeting smiles. It's as good as you can get until you're ready to be more honest.

 

 

     Today the two of you stand before the tallest tower the Pacific was able to boast. Jade's house has seen better days. At the bottom of the hill lies the spherical top of the tower, bits of metal shrapnel and other garbage still strewn in the muddy grass. Under the crumbling edges where the house exploded, another piece of the tower seems to have been destroyed as well. It's hard to tell which shrapnel belongs to which accident. You watch Jade stare up at the manor, her mouth set in a grimace.

     “This is going to be a stretch,” she mutters. She pushes her hair from her freckle-dusted face.

     “How hard can it be to pop a giant ball back onto a tower. Bippity boppity boo, just snap all the atoms together.”

     “That's not quite how it works,” sighs Jade. “When something made of, say, porcelain breaks... it doesn't break into perfect pieces. There's dust and other impossibly tiny bits that can't be glued back to the bigger slices.” She talks with her hands, imitating a cracked-open vase with upturned palms. “Such is the case with the tower. I _could_ stick the lab back on top, but enough pieces might be lacking to make it roll right back off. I'd have to find all of the original components. Which is a lot.”

     “Well, there's gotta be a hot glue gun somewhere on one of these planets.”

     Jade's laugh comes out like a bark. “Yeah, we'd have to spend the day killing underlings to pay for all those glue sticks.”

 

     You've come along today to help Jade set her wrecked home in order, a task she could neglect no longer. The idea of coming to LOFAF didn't particularly appeal to you. But you didn't feel safe letting her go alone, even if she insisted that she's already spent days here without incident. It isn't as though you'd be of any use to her if Echidna decided to nuke this planet too, but at least she wouldn't be by herself. You should probably be chilled by how you've embraced the possibility of a sudden death by implosion, but you've been a world class defeatist for a while now.

     How did only two people live here? It was always your presumption that Jade lived in something like a thatched roof bungalow, the spitting image of a tropical island lifestyle. Using Google Earth to study the unusual address she gave you for her birthday package yielded no results besides a pixelized patch of blue water. So the towering ivory skyscraper in front of you comes as a shock. Hellmurder Tower would stretch far above most of the buildings in your downtown neighborhood. If it wasn't already clear, Jade has swept the floor with all of you in the contest for most bizarre upbringing.

 

     A cicada-looking bug buzzes by your ear, and you smack it away. “Might as well give it a shot. See what happens.”

     “All right.” Jade raises her hands, the edges of her fingers crackling with a neon glow. “Going up....”

 

     The orb groans at the bottom of the ditch, outlined with chartreuse as Jade persuades it out of the mud. When it comes away and begins to hover, clumps of moss and soil release their grip. A huge imprint of an atom on the side of the lab is caked with dark earth. Jade turns her palms skyward, and the missing piece to her house begins a diagonal ascension. You push the bridge of your sunglasses up and watch it climb.

     With a swivel of her wrist, Jade rotates the lab until its logo faces the right direction. Far above, there is a heavy thunk as it grinds into the position where it once stood. A massive flock of startled hummingbirds flee from the neighboring treetops.

     Jade tentatively releases her hold on the lab, sucking in a breath. Her overbite is exaggerated as she bites her bottom lip. It wobbles precariously, and when it begins to tilt Jade groans and resumes her grip.

 

     “I told you it wouldn't be easy.”

     “I'm tellin' ya Jade, hot glue guns. It's a legit option.”

     “Hm. Hot glue, huh?” Jade taps the tip of her nose. “You know what? I have a crazy idea.”

     “Lay it on me.”

     “I'm wondering....” she starts. “What if I... _took_ some lava from the Forge....”

     “What.”

     “And I just cooled it down....”

     “What the hell.”

     “And that would be the adhesive? Once it hardens, that is. I think that could work.” Her mouth is scrunched in contemplation as she stares above.

     You cross your arms. “I'm gonna give this idea the green light if only for the fact that I'd really like to see a floating cloud of lava. That sounds pretty metal.”

     Jade snorts. “Trust me, it'll be hardcore.”

     “Have at it, then.”

 

     Not far from Jade's house, the massive Forge stretches almost to the stratosphere. She raises an arm above her head, and a geyser of yellow magma launches from its mouth. Jade swings her arm back to her side in a dramatic swipe, and the green-tinged lava circles the circumference of the tower in a thin band. The dirt-caked orb hovers feet above the house.

     “Now let's slow down those particles....”

     Jade flicks her fingers, and the lava changes to a vivid crimson as it's forced to cool. It loses its color in seconds as she lowers the makeshift glue onto the inside edges of the infrastructure. The top of the tower sinks into the cement-gray lava. Globs of it run down the sides of the house in slow motion.

     “Looks like you mighta overfilled the glass.”

     Jade's ears twitch. “Just need to shave it off. I don't want it to get into the windows.”

     In a burst of light, Jade vanishes the leftover trails of lava to god knows where, along with the mud that caked the atom-stamped sphere. What remains is a dark, uneven, and obvious band where the tower exploded during the session. But her out of the box idea seems to have worked. The tower stands almost whole now.

 

     Jade places her hands on her hips. “It's not beautiful, I'll admit. But at least it's done.” She flips her hair back. “I would have felt terrible, just leaving everything there.”

     “Jade.”

     “Yes?”

     “What was that other part that broke off.”

     Jade frowns, her ears swiveling back against her hair. “That was my bedroom. My dreambot exploded when my dream self died, and she took out the whole thing with her.”

     Oh, so her claims of having a robot weren't bullshit after all. You guess that should come as no surprise. “That sucks.”

     “Yeah....” Jade rubs the back of her neck. “My bed survived, at least. And a few other things. But the rest of it is gone. Sorry to disappoint you, if you were expecting a full tour.”

     You shrug. “It would take like, five hours to explore that monstrosity anyway. How do you even _live_ in something this big. Like, try to go to the bathroom and end up in Kitchen Number Thirty-Four. No one's been in there since the sixties and there's just a buncha tins of Ovaltine along with some skeletons of rats who got lost also.”

     Jade smiles coyly. “We didn't rely on stairs very much.”

     “What's that mean. You got elevators in there? Not that it matters, 'cause we can fly.”

     “You'll see. Come on!”

 

     Your heartbeat quickens when Jade grabs your hand, tugging you uphill towards the house. You tremble at the thought of what might be in there, though with everything you've seen in the past few months it should take a lot to disturb you. Jade pushes the front door open slowly, peering inside as though checking that it's in acceptable condition before leading you within. The steel door clunks shut behind you, and you stand with Jade in the dim light.

     She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “Welcome to my house.”

 

     The foyer is almost bare, marks left in the damask carpet where long-standing furniture was teleported away. A few Persian rugs remain in some spots, their designs faded with time. You breathe in, inhaling the smell of yellowing paper and the ashes in the fireplace. And _wow_ , what a weird-ass fireplace. It's split down the middle between gold and violet, evoking the imagery of Prospit and Derse.

     Your eyes follow the baroque carvings of the mantle to a painting of Jade that sits propped on top, surrounded by candles that have burned down to tiny stubs of wax. No, wait, it's not a painting – it's a photograph. Jade wears something yellow. Dream pajamas, maybe? The look on her face sends a shudder through you. She isn't looking at anything, her eyes glazed over and her mouth set in a stiff Mona Lisa smile. A long line of black stitches runs through her left eye in a way that makes her resemble Nanna. Come to think of it, didn't Jadesprite have a scarred face as well? You recoil.

     When you pry your eyes from the photo, you see that Jade is watching your reaction carefully. Her ears are perked to full attention, green eyes wide. She's waiting for you to say something.

     “This... is some decoration you've got going on,” you flounder, voice cracking.

     She looks away, dog ears relaxing. “I guess it's just as well that I lost the stranger bits of décor.” Jade ambles ahead of you, running her hand along the purple half of the mantle. “It's all right, you know. You can admit it's weird. I didn't know just how different it was until I got to see what the other houses looked like.” She turns to face you, her hands clasped behind her back. You try not to compare her with her portrait.

     The room seems colder, and you rub your bare shoulders. Your abdomen complains when you brush the stitches underneath the gauze. “Okay, yeah. You got me. It's a little spooky in here.”

     Jade smiles at the floor. “No offense taken.” She tucks a curl of hair behind her ear. “In that case, you don't want to see the next few floors.”

     “Don't I.”

     “You _really_ don't,” she snickers.

     “You got buried treasure up there? Alien hybrid experiments? The Book of the Dead? The secret to Nic Cage's career longevity?”

     Jade hides her face in her hands. “Nothing like that! It's just quite... colorful. We can just skip some levels, and I can show you stuff that's less....”

     “...Yeah.”

     “Yeah.”

     “It's your house,” you say, pushing your aviators up. “You don't gotta show me anything you don't wanna.”

     She twiddles her thumbs. “It isn't that I want to _hide_ anything from you. But I know it'll be a lot to take in.” She looks up at you shyly, shifting her gaze to the wall when you make eye contact. “Actually, you're the first to actually see the inside of the house in person.”

     “Really?”

     “Yes. People have seen it on-screen, at least,” Jade says. Her face settles into a soft frown. “It isn't the same, though. I don't know what I should and shouldn't show you.”

     You shake your head. “So, wait. You mean not even Dave came in here? Didn't you spend like, several hours trying to make a magic frog?”

     She laughs a bit. “Something like that. It was mostly outdoor work, though. By the time he found the house, I had already spoken with Echidna.”

     Your stomach sinks, thinking of the hours Dave spent with her. More like days, actually, with the nature of time travel. You don't want to speculate what he may have said to her in that time. But now is not the time to be envious – it doesn't look good on you. “Must've been a long-ass walk.”

     “It was. The snow was beginning to melt, so I never invited him inside. I had all the frog coordinates in my pocket,” Jade continues, patting her hip. “We didn't have all day to dawdle.”

     “Goal-oriented. I can respect that.”

     “Thank you.”

     “So I guess I'm like your beta visitor. You can test out all your tour guide skills on me, and I'll give you constructive criticism. Improve the execution for next time, y'know.”

     “Am I training to be a professional tour guide now?” Jade giggles.

     “Why not. We've got three years to hone in on some new hobbies. Really become well-rounded citizens. A jack of all trades, if you will.”

     “I see. What would I do with such a powerful asset?”

     “You could become a real estate agent. Sell some of those Skaian castles back to the chess people. Like, check it out folks. This one only has _minimal_ blood stains. Less than any other in a twenty-mile radius. They are permanent but you can hang some nice drapery up to conceal it. Strike while the iron's hot, this is prime property.”

     “Jack of all trades, and master of none!” Jade pushes up her glasses. “Before we worry about that, let me show you the house.”

     “After you.”

 

     Jade takes your hand again, and this time you don't shrink away at all. She doesn't _have_ to touch you to zap you along with her, but she's already made it a habit. You're trying and failing not to read too much into it. The two of you warp to a higher level of the house, your field of vision flooding with green. You wonder if you'll ever get used to the sensation of teleporting. It feels like getting squeezed through an incredibly narrow slide, and for a split second your lungs feel fit to pop.

     She drops your hand before she can realize that your palms are sweating. You've reappeared in a massive cross-shaped room full of what used to be glass panels, though it seems that yet another incident has blown them all out. Daylight filters in freely, and you can see clouds of dust particles as they float into the room. A wall is lined with shining SBURB equipment. In one of the open windows, blue and white bedsheets are billowing on a clothesline in the breeze. The bed they belong to is tucked inconspicuously into a corner, partially obscured by glazed pots of tiny fruit trees. Its posts are stained with dry mud where it landed outside.

     The far end of the space is filled with rows of wooden planks held up by upside-down gardening pots, some of which have shattered. Only a handful of flowerpots are still sitting upright where they belong, with even more broken and scattered on the ground amid stray fruits and vegetables. Chains from the ceiling have also snapped, leaving the pots they were suspending smashed open on the ground in mandalas of soil. Your sprite tail brushes the side of a pumpkin.

 

     “It's still a mess,” Jade says with a quiet sigh, plucking a bruised apple off the floor and fiddling with its stem. “This was the atrium. I spent, gosh, most of my time in here. It's the most cheerful place I could think of in the house. Though it's certainly looked better.”

     “Meh. Still looks pretty sick to me.”

     “I'm glad. I can't think of a better room to start off the tour, honestly.” Jade sets the apple aside and strolls with you past the rows of ruined benches, coated with drywall and bits of glass. She casts a mournful gaze across them. The sight of these dead flowers may as well be a corpse-ridden battlefield in her eyes. She continues ahead of you, her head bent low.

 

     You run your thumb across the rough edges of a table, a sticker reading “Asparagus” in Jade's looping handwriting peeling off at both ends.

     “Did you stay here at all... like, last week?” You're not sure how to pose the question, and immediately regret it when you see her ears flatten from behind.

     “A lot, actually. I wandered all over the house, though.” Jade pauses in front of the bedsheets that wave in the wind, plucking them from their line and folding them over her arm. “I kept waking up in here thinking it'd be different. That it'd all be normal. Like I just fell asleep on accident as always, and the windows would be back and the flowers would be alive and... I don't know.”

     A lump rises in your throat. “I get it.”

     Jade walks past you with her sheets in her arms. Her fingers rub a threadbare patch where it looks like claws have pulled at the fabric. “It probably sounds dumb, but since there's no where else for my bed to go, I'd like to leave it here.”

     “You don't want it on the ship? Those sheets are like napkins.” You float above a knocked-over orange tree and watch Jade work her way past the pots that surround her bed.

     She snorts, unfolding the cloud-patterned sheets and throwing them over the mattress. “No. The ship isn't awful, but it isn't home. I can't force myself to view it that way. It's like... it's like....”

     “Like staying at a motel.”

     “Exactly!” Jade pauses. “Except, for three years.”

     “Yeah. Except for three years.”

     Jade tucks the edges of her sheets into the mattress, and with a snap of her fingers the patches of dirt that cling to her bedposts disappear. It looks cute now, a Ghibli-worthy niche in the middle of a nuclear fallout. If you photoshopped away the smashed-out glass behind the headboard, it would probably be a hit with aesthetic bloggers. Jade places her hands on her hips, nodding at the finished product.

     “This is much better.”

     “Yeah. It really is,” you agree. “Are you gonna live here now?”

     Jade laughs, swaying her hand from side to side. “Oh, no. I couldn't stand to spend the rest of my time here.”

     “Doesn't seem so bad.”

     “I'm glad you think this room counts as being in livable condition, Davesprite. But I'm going to have to hold myself to a higher standard.”

     “Suit yourself.” You swing idly around one of the granite columns keeping the ceiling up. The stone is cool on your palm.

 

     Jade brushes her hands over the wrinkled sheets, then returns to the few plants she has left. Above her, you begin to fly in circles around the perimeter of the atrium. The draft feels weird on the healing edges of your busted wing. You swoop to the top of the ceiling, enjoying the space you have that's free of amphibians and clunky chess people.

     Your tail brushes the metal edge of a suspended speaker, and you take a moment to examine the thick cables. They look heavy.

     “Jesus, Jade, these things are wasting their potential. You could host raves in here.”

     “Absolutely not! No raves for my plants. Though playing more gentle music for them _does_ help them grow,” Jade replies.

     “I've gotta see this. A jam session just for the greens. That's the most precious thing I've ever heard of in my life.”

     Jade laughs, bending over and picking up a small pot of yellow flowers. Her fingers trace the rim softly. “Maybe someday. But not any time soon.”

     “Why not.”

     She clasps the flowers close to her, burrowing her nose in their petals. “I'm not ready to rebuild this place. It's... I don't know. As bad as it looks, it has some sentimental value.”

     “Oh. Sorry.”

     “It's all right.” Jade lowers the pot onto a dusty table, fluffing out the golden blossoms. You watch her cradle the plant from up above, your palms resting on a swaying speaker. Her hair looks like a storm cloud from your bird's-eye view. “Gardening simply takes more time and effort than I'm willing to put it in right now. I may as well leave it as is.”

     “Can't abandon the call forever, Garden Gnostic.”

     Jade smiles. “Nor would I want to. It simply needs to stay like this for a while.”

     “Time capsule, huh. All right. So what else have you got up your sleeve.”

     She runs a yellow flower petal between her fingers. “Follow me upstairs. I have to set that lab in order.”

     “Beam me up, Scotty.”

 

     You dive down and trail after Jade to a white disk installed into the floor, the surface etched with geometric patterns. The pad is enveloped by two snaking staircases, one leading up, the other down into darkness. It finally clicks, what Jade meant about stairs. There are transportalizers in this house. Go fucking figure. It'd give you a migraine to make sense of how Jade's mad scientist grandfather was able to get this kind of SBURB technology in the house, so you quickly opt out. The go-to solution is just to assume that the Harleys live their lives as nonsensically as possible. It's their default setting. If something about the house seems run-of-the-mill, it needs to be fixed.

     As soon as Jade's feet position themselves on the grooves of the transportalizer, she's gone in a snap of dark green. You follow without a second thought, _this_ form of teleportation being much less foreign to you. It's marginally more comfortable than the First Guardian version of warping, like slipping into a warm pool and coming out bone-dry on the other end.

     You guess the transportalizer detected you by way of motion, since you had no feet with which to step onto it. It spits you out on a higher floor, cold and cramped.

 

     Jade stands by what looks like a futuristic refrigerator, its door blasted off at the hinges. She runs her fingertips on one of its scorched panels.

     “What science experiment got out of that thing. Does it have sentience? Is it gonna come after us demanding to know what love is.”

     “Pff, no. This is where my dreambot was stored.” Jade kicks the fridge's steel side, the metal reverberating. “I guess this got broken, too.”

     A draft blows in, and you shiver in your bandages. Jade looks up, gray light flowing down into the antechamber and across her face.

     “Right above us is where my bedroom was. There's nothing to show for that, obviously.”

     “So like, the stuff on the ship is all that's left of it.”

     “Besides the bed.”

     “Yeah, besides that.”

     “Yup!” Jade sighs through her nose. “I'm really going to miss some of the stuff in there.”

     “Like what.”  
  
      She folds her arms. “My bass was in there. I might alchemize another later, but I'm not sure yet. I had a picture of my grandpa in there, too.” Jade scratches the back of her neck. “Oh, and the poster you sent me is gone, too. Sorry.”

     “What the hell!”

     “I can't control the whims of robots, Davesprite!”

     You huff. “Do you know the looks I got from the guy working at Kinko's that day? I think he was about to kick me out. Wasting his ink on jpeg artifacts or whatever.”

     “I am truly sorry.”

     “I guess I forgive you. Or your dream robot for combusting. Or uh... your dream self for biting the dust.”

     “Gee, _thanks_.”

     “And the lab is above your bedroom, right.”

     “Right. Let's keep going.”

     “Okay.”

 

     Jade looks toward the inside wall when you pass the place where her room once stood, a string of hummingbirds twittering on a ledge of plaster and steel foundation. At last you reach the bottom of the lab, and Jade pushes open an overhead door to get inside.

     You poke your head cautiously into the space. It smells acrid, a heat still radiating from where the sphere was reattached to the tower. Jade stands atop a stack of antiques, overseeing a kingdom of chaos. The lab's singular window is fully open, and the light outlines her with white.

 

     “Look at all this! It's even worse than I remember.” She shakes her head. “Geez, I hope nothing's broken. If he were here to see this....”

     She jumps from a pile of what you realize are discombobulated suits of armor, armets and bevors and gauntlets scattered like disembodied limbs. The feathers on your neck puff up when they clash together, the clanking of metal nearly making you gag. You shake your head quickly, willing your ruff to settle.

     Jade bends down and rifles through a pile of gadgets, muttering to herself in frustrated tones. You coast to the top of the domed ceiling, surveying the inventory with your talons hissing along the wall. It's a hot eclectic mess, like someone took a museum and shook it like a snowglobe.

     “Are these... salon posters?” You swoop down and pick up a picture that's sandwiched between a vintage globe and a dented knight's helmet. It's sun-bleached and crinkling with water damage, corners peeling off of the cardboard its affixed to. A blue and purple woman with an eighties perm gives you an over-the-shoulder grin. Her hoop earrings are half the size of her face.

     Jade looks up and sneers. “Ugh, _yes_ ,” she groans. “There's a lot more downstairs.”

     “Next on _True Life: I Steal Posters From Beauty Salons_.” The material it's printed on smells terrible, like hairspray and wet cardboard. “I gotta tell ya Jade, I just found out a lot more about your grandpa than I ever wanted to know.”

     “Try living with them.” Jade takes up a poster that looks like Cyndi Lauper's long lost twin. “These were supposed to be my 'role models' growing up, I guess you could say.” She runs her fingers across the top edge of the photo, smoothing the wrinkles out. “I agree that they're bizarre, but they were sort of like my sisters.”

     “Wow, because you look exactly like them, right.”

     “Oh, hush. I didn't know any other girls in real life.” Her expression softens as she holds the poster, a look somewhere near fondness.

     “Role models? Like, you were supposed to grow up to wear neon windbreakers and leg warmers outside of the gym.”

     Jade laughs, propping Cyndi against the wall. “No, my taste in clothes will never be that bad.”

     “Thank god. Don't go vintage on me, Jade. I mean it.”

     Jade folds her arms. “I think the Eclectica Girls are far from the most vintage things in here, but if you insist.”

     “Yeah, like this shit?” You tentatively pick up what was probably once a monkey, all gnarled claws with an existential howl of horror frozen on its face. The skin is rough and bristly. “Honestly, you could sell this entire room for millions. What was your grandpa doing with all this.”

     “Ran out of room downstairs!” Jade doesn't seem grossed out by your mummified guests. “He had a lot of interests.”

     You set the monkey down, shaking your hands off to get the grossness off. “Not sure how this qualifies as a lab, though.”

     Jade holds a small stack of metal frames in her arms. “Do you recognize these?”

     You squint. The metal frames are bursting with colorful wires, split up into four to six sections of black glass. “They look sort of like the... thingy.”

      “The thingy?”

      “The window. The window the ship is headed towards.”

      “Correct!” Jade levitates a table upright, setting the windows down in a neat pile. “It's been drastically enlarged, but it originally stayed up here. _That_ is how this qualifies as a lab – things like that.”

     “Your grandpa just. Had a window up here. That leads to another game session.”

     “Yes.”

     “Why.”

     “I wouldn't worry about it too much.”

     “Fair.”

 

     You decide to dive headfirst into one of your favorite hobbies and snoop through the rest of the lab's antiques. A gold sarcophagus mask is heavier than it appears, and you grunt when you pick it up. It stares at you passively through eyes of onyx and lapis lazuli. The gold is scratched in places, roughed up by the orb's avalanching down the hillside. You lift the mask over your head.

     “Jade.”

     “What?” She's moved across the room, rummaging through what sounds like more armory.

     “Look at me.”

     There's a few seconds of silence.

     “Davesprite! Take that off!”

     “Am I not beautiful.”

     “The pharaoh look doesn't suit you.” Her voice is muffled, and you imagine her with her hands on her hips, her cheeks puffed out like a pissed off squirrel. “Take it off – and don't break it!”

     “So I'm not America's Top Model, then.”

     “Davesprite!”

     “Okay, Tyra.”

 

     You bend forward and slide the mummy head off, setting it face-down on the floor. It's not the only one of its kind, and there are even some complete coffins. It's an Egyptologist's dream. “Where did your grandpa get this stuff.”

     Across the room, Jade is using her space powers to put a suit of armor back together. It looks possessed, all vibrating and glowing limbs. “He traveled the world, collecting valuables along the way. It's easy to get away with nabbing these kinds of treasures when you have the kind of charisma he did.” She pauses. “And the money.”

     Makes sense. The aura of this room – all disorganized valuables and kitschy collectibles – is pretty inline with what you assumed about her grandpa. From what she told you, he seemed like the result of mixing Bill Gates with Steve Irwin. “Why did he stop traveling. Seems like a pretty sweet life to me.”

     “To colonize the island! My home used to be a jungle.” Jade clunks all the pieces of the knight together, and he stands complete and tall. “He cleared it all away, and set up this tower on a mountain to run on the thermal power from the volcano. More people were going to live there, eventually. He was freeing space for a research facility.”

     “So you never traveled with him.”

     “Oh, _no_. Even if he did bring me along with him, I wouldn't have been old enough to remember.”

 

     Your brow furrows. Something about Jade's tone is very off – you remember Bro's death like it had literally just happened, but for Jade the loss of her guardian seems like ancient history. Her tone is more akin to fond nostalgia rather than fresh grief, and as she recounts the story of her island to you, her expression never fades from a small smile. Have you been lied to? A chill creeps into your spine.

     Jade stands with her back to you, taking her newly arranged knight and moving it to the wall by its forearms. Her ears perk up and swivel to face you when you say her name.

     “Jade?”

     When she turns, only the whites of her wide eyes are visible. Her expression is masked in the shady silhouette cast by the incoming daylight.

     “What?”

     “When did your grandpa die?”

 

     Jade exhales quietly, turning away from you. A humid breeze wafts into the room, and the curls of her hair dance. She drifts up to perch on the ledge of the lab's open window. You follow suit, floating just feet behind her.

     For a while she doesn't answer you, and the only sound comes from the distant croaking of frogs hundreds of feet below. Jade's folded hands twinge in her lap, and finally she speaks.

     “I didn't think you'd believe me.”

     You fidget, fists balling up. “Believe you about what?”

     Her face turns slightly, mostly hidden by hair. “I didn't... I didn't think....” she sighs and rests her head in her hands. “There's only so much you can tell someone you've never met about your life before they'll think you're lying to them.”

     You say nothing.

     “I told you and Rose more than I ever told John. I don't know why, but it seemed like since you never really took anything at face value... maybe you would be more inclined to believe me. I'm sure Rose thought I was either a pathological liar or a schizophrenic. I've been very lucky, that you never brushed off anything I told you.”

     “So... what are you saying?”

     Jade looks up, gazing at the sky. “There were things I left out. Things I didn't think any of you would understand. Please, don't think I lied to you on purpose.”

     “Jade?”

     “I wasn't even five yet.” She hangs her head, and you hear her sniffle quietly. “I wasn't even _five_.”

 

     Your throat is dry, burning with secondhand grief. An island in the middle of the Pacific, hidden in pixelized patches of blue – and at the top of the tower was the only human for thousands of miles, no one but flowers and a space-warping canine for family. And she never even told you the truth. It's with a sinking stomach that you realize you never _really_ understood Jade at all. A crushing inferiority takes over you as what remains of your naivety regarding Jade Harley vanishes. You feel sick.

     Jade turns to face you. Her face is just _so_ miserable, a look that you recognize from Rose as you stood overlooking Derse, a look you recognize from your own mirror before you stopped looking at yourself, and it pulls you sharply back into reality.

     “I'm glad you're here,” she whispers.

     The two of you are on level footing, shaved down to the same rung by a swinging pendulum of arbitrary loss.

     You nod. “Yeah.”


	11. Chapter 11

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 21, April 2009

 

     This planet lacks a star to give it night and day, but since you've killed the lights in your room – the new Medium in which LOFAF hangs – the pitch that shrouds your atrium is a convincing imitation of the current time. At just past midnight, you've been in bed for a while, tossing and turning in sheets that still smell of salt and sand. Davesprite mumbles something in his sleep, rolls over with his back to you. You draw your legs into a fetal position and pull the blanket up to your chin.

     He had collapsed at the end of your bed like he was just sitting down for a moment and would find somewhere else to crash soon. You knew he would end up sleeping here, and he knew you knew – he's been doing this for the past few days. Like Bec when he sensed he wasn't allowed on your bed, curled up at the far end and looking at you sheepishly from over the top of his paws. This must be revenge for you falling asleep in his room last week.

     You can scarcely go anywhere now without Davesprite shlepping along no more than a few yards behind. It isn't that you mind – to say you're relieved that he actually wants to spend time with you is an understatement. His company has kept your mental state from the absolute bedrock – you would hate for him to see you as you were days ago, and so you hold yourself together with string. But a certain agitation nags at you, one you're almost unaware of and one that sets you on edge, ready to flee, to warp away thousands of miles from any living being. To just be alone for a moment. Isolation was never fun, but you are not wired for whatever this is.

     It is just past midnight and you are nowhere near sleep. You kick off your sheets and pad to a window in your bare feet, tiptoeing around a glittery coat of shattered glass. The frogs are quiet now, the rainforest dark and muggy below the atrium. Rubbing your eyes with the bottom of your palm, you squint at the planets just visible past the haze of LOFAF's atmosphere. They turn silently, glowing with a faint radiation. There is nowhere for you to go.

     You start to pace to other end of the room, then turn on your heel and tread back. Your heart pounds in your ribs – a nervous palpitating that now arises every time you're alone, when you have nothing to do and no one to talk to. The sudden wave of your panic harries your breathing. You continue like this for a bit, clenching the front of your shirt in your fist and pacing back and forth around the floor. Left foot, right foot, left foot, turn around, turn around again, pull your hair back, unclench your fist, clench it again, turn around, right foot, left foot. After a while your legs get tired, which prompts you to simply stand waveringly before your bed, swaying as you rub the fabric of your shirt between your thumb and index. Davesprite's whole wing flutters in his sleep, sweeps back and brushes a bedpost.

     If you stay here any longer, if you stay in this greenhouse that reeks of soil and steel and the electric twinge of a days-old explosion, if you return to bed and continue to toss with your whirring thoughts and your dread for the timeline and the tears on your pillowcase and the sound of LOWAS' crust coming undone and Davesprite at the footboard with a sleep-scowl on his face muttering something you can't interpret, you are going to lose your mind.

 

    It isn't without some remorse, some deep anxiety that you stand at the footboard, checking to make sure he's really asleep. Eyebrows furrowed, Davesprite squeezes his eyes shut at some invisible threat. His sunglasses are going to get screwed up if he keeps sleeping in them. You don't want to leave him by himself, but you don't want to be alone either. Is it rude to wake people up? You wouldn't know; you only tried to do so when it was a matter of life or death. And you probably won't _die_ if you stay here. Probably.

     Your hand hovers at the edges of Davesprite's stitched stump of a wing. You're not sure what you're doing. Maybe subliminally assuring him that you'll be back, eventually. Before he wakes up, even. You're just going out. Echidna won't blow the planet up, will she? You'll keep an eye out, you promise. Don't be mad, okay? You have to go now – you see, you feel like your blood is about to course right out of your skin. It's kind of an emergency. But you'll be back. Don't be mad.

 

     You leap inches off the ground, feet kicking up in a slow motion dance as your body dissipates into a silhouette of green lightning. In his sleep, Davesprite hugs his sides and groans.

 

     The halls of the battleship are near silent. Only the emergency lights remain on, leaving patches of darkness along the corridor. You tread lightly past every occupied door, in and out of the light's jurisdiction. One of your bare feet draws a creak out of one of the floor's bolted panels, setting you on edge. There is a distant thumping, a sound of feet walking above you, and a reptilian squawk in another hall. Evidence of the many lives that have continued on in your stagnancy. The sight of LOFAF, of Echidna's deep and coiled sleep remain in your peripheral. Just in case.

     You know full well where you're going, though you try to convince yourself that you're just walking aimlessly. It helps to abate your nerves, to prevent you from turning around and running in the opposite direction. Left foot, right foot, don't turn around, left foot, inhale, right foot, left foot, exhale, stop.

     It feels like a while that you stand in front of the kitchen, rocking on your heels and chewing your bottom lip. You keep your head bent low, somehow afraid that she'll see you past the round windows on the double-doors. Several times you raise your hand to push them open, then drop it to your side again. You're almost mad at yourself. No reason to be afraid of family. Inhale, exhale, left foot, hand to the door, push–

 

     “If you think you're going to raid the fridge tonight, think again. Didn't your mother tell you that midnight snacking is bad for you?” Nanna huffs. Her back is turned, floating at the counter and flipping furiously through a thick binder. The harlequin hat rests on a barstool.

     “Um....” you flounder, voice barely a mumble. Maybe this was a bad idea. You consider leaving before she can realize you're not a carapacian, but it's too late. Nanna's shoulders straighten. She turns to face you, slack-jawed.

     Neither of you say anything.

     “Hi, Nanna,” you murmur.

     Nanna's face softens.

    “Well, there's _just_ the person I was waiting for.”

     She waits for you to approach, then takes your shoulder in her ghost hand and pulls you into a hug. Your chest feels hollow from the effort it takes not to cry, face buried in the ragged collar of her tunic.

     “I'm sorry. Things got in the way. I'm sorry I never came back.” You can hear the full force of Nanna's sigh against your ear.

    “No need to apologize.” Nanna pulls away and rubs your cheek with her thumb. “Although I _will_ accept any apologies related to not eating.”

    A smile finds its way to your mouth. “I ate _some_.”

     “Some is not enough! And I thought we were reversing that dreadful– what did you call it?”

     “Veganism.”

    “That was it!” Nanna clucks and shakes her head. “Kids with their fad diets. You aren't getting out of here without _something_ , I can tell you that.”

     “It's kind of late, though. Don't you sleep?”

     “Sprites don't have to!” boasts Nanna “So no, I don't!”

     “Davesprite sleeps, though,” you say.

     “That's because boys are lazy,” Nanna whispers to you. “Now come on, follow me.”

 

     She slaps a hand on your back and ushers you to the counter. The binder she was reading seems to have originated from wherever the chef's quarters was, and Nanna doesn't look impressed with it.

     “I thought I'd brush up on the local cooking customs,” she starts. “Look at this, Jade. Just look at these recipes. I think these people would be content to live on raw pumpkins if you gave them an option. No offense to them,” she sniffs, adjusting her glasses.

     “I don't think you're far off.”

     “No? I thought so.” Nanna snaps the binder shut. “I'll have to stick to the ones up here, then,” she says, tapping her temple.

     “Like what?”

     “A good old-fashioned cake wouldn't hurt, would it?” She hoots with laughter when you can only smile. “Help me set up, then, would you dear?”

     “I'll do my best.”

 

     Nanna makes quick work of filling every inch of the countertop. You're able to set two mixing bowls down by the time she's turned the cabinets inside out with wooden spoons, tiny burlap sacks of flour and sugar, and what looks like a cold carton of eggs. You snap open the perforated edges, peeking inside and poking at the contents.

    “I'm really curious about how you're _getting_ all of this,” you wonder aloud. You turn a little white egg between your fingers. Nanna unscrews a huge mason jar of something honey-colored, sniffs at it, then makes a face and stuffs it back under a shelf.

     “Well, a lot of it was already here!” she says, weighing a sack of salt in her hand. “Gone bad, of course. Spoiled. Left in here to rot!”

     “So how'd you fix them?”

     “A little alchemization combined with some tricks from the era before refrigeration,” replies Nanna. She winks at you with her slashed eye. The pupil is all but white, a milky blue along the deep gash that prototyping gave her.

     “I think you lost me,” you say, plopping into a barstool and resting your cheek in your hand. “Is this a riddle or something?”

    “No tricks! There isn't anything worth being cagey about now, Jade – although I _would_ like to keep some secrets, considering how shrouded in mystery this entire journey is!” Nanna throws her hand up in a half-shrug. “Allow me to give you the abridged version. First, captchalogue the no-good goods.”

     “Okay.”

     “Then, captchalogue some salt.”

     “All right?”

     “Then combine the two!”

     “Um....”

     “Not convinced, are you?” Nanna swings open the metal fridge, slides a drawer open, and tosses you an orange the size of your fist. “Take a bite of that and tell me what you taste.”

     You pick at the peel with your nails, sticking your tongue out and ripping the skin off in even spirals. The first slice tastes perfectly normal, if not a punch to your senses compared to how little you've been eating. The taste makes you shudder – oranges were always your favorite, and it feels like it's been years since you've eaten one.

     “It tastes fine,” you murmur, wiping your citrusy hand on your pant leg.

     “Wait for it.”

     You tilt your head, and seconds after you swallow you can taste the salt, barely there but tingling in the back of your mouth. “Oh, geez.”

     “I'll bet it's better than eating rotten fruit though, isn't it?”

     “Yeah....” you smack your lips, setting the orange on a folded-over washcloth. “Maybe save your method for stuff like meat? I can regrow fruits and vegetables once I get the atrium fixed. Whenever that is.”

     “Well, I would certainly appreciate the help.” Nanna wipes her brow. “I already blast through so much of that grist every day. It's a good thing you kids made quick work of those underlings, or we'd be left eating dirt!”

     You stifle a laugh. “It's funny that you're the best one with alchemizing. I think all I made was weird robots and some new dresses.”

     Nanna puts a hand on her hip. “And why is that funny to you, young lady?”

     “I mean, old people aren't very good with technology.”

     Nanna lunges around the table, gives you a noogie with her ghost hand while you shriek with laughter. “What was that? I didn't quite hear you!”

    “Oh my gosh, _stoooop_ ,” you howl. “I didn't mean it!”

     “Could you repeat that, dear? I can't hear you over my pacemaker!”

     You curl your legs up to your chest, leaning away from her. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Uncle!”

     Nanna relinquishes and floats around to her side of the counter, hooting all the way. “Oh dear, I wonder who that sweet girl was. Unfortunately I can't see a thing past these cataracts, hoo hoo hoo....”

    “Okay, _most_ old people are bad with technology, and you're like... a prodigy.”

    “That's more like it!” Nanna opens and closes the last few cabinets, humming under her breath. “You know, the chess people are _so_ charming, but they'll eat us out of ship and home if I'm not careful.”

     “They're probably recovering from the war. Some of them might've been starving.”

     “Very true. It was a nasty sight down there, wasn't it?”

     You cast your eyes down, folding your hands at your gut. “Hm.”

     An analog clock on the wall ticks in monotone, the only sound as the rumbling boilers kick off.

 

    Nanna thumbs her sprite pendant, the metal pristine, green spirals gleaming and bright. “I wonder if it was the right thing to do. Leaving him there... it isn't as though I could have _done_ anything, but....”

     “Nanna?”

     Nanna looks up, surprised at herself. “Oh, I don't mean to make you feel worse, Jade. Just thinking aloud. That's what old people do.”

     “You know, a couple days into the journey....” You fidget. No one knows about the cleanup you've done, and it makes you tense to bring it up. Not everyone is at ease with dealing with corpses as you are. No one's had to tear one open and stuff it head to toe, either.

     “Hm?”

     “I, uh. I buried them. I buried the bodies.” You rub the back of your neck, ears swiveling back. “Teleported underground. I don't really know how funerals work, so it was the best I could do. I didn't want them to... well, yeah.”

     “Is that so?” Nanna drums her fingers under her nose, looking past you at the double-doors. “That's a relief.”

     “You're not mad?”

     “Goodness, no. To think of my boy on that tower....” Nanna curls her sprite tail around the pole of her barstool. “All I found was the hat. The rest was word of mouth. One of the stout little chess people remembered seeing him with that woman.”

     “Rose's mom?”

     Nanna blinks. “Who is Rose?”

     “Davesprite's sister.”

     “I see.”

     For a moment, neither of you speak. Eventually Nanna sighs in what seems like resignation, and when her hand rests on the edge of the counter you think you see her fingers shake.

     “Well, I'll get started with that cake, then.”

 

     Nanna opens up a cloth sack stamped with the name of its contents, pouring out a fine, soft layer of flour into the biggest bowl on the counter. You lean over the yellow linoleum, propped on your elbows to see her work. Some of it forms a cloud above the bowl, a haze of powder that makes you sneeze into the crook of your arm.

     “Allergic?”

     You wipe your nose. “I don't think so?”

     “Let's hope not!”

 

     While Nanna pours in one indistinguishable white substance after another, you mash a packet of brown sugar between your fingers. You're content to just sit like this, to focus on someone pouring their effort into something without having to think of anything at all. You hand the carton of eggs to Nanna when she requests it, watching her crack one expertly on the side of the bowl. Your vision unfocuses, and as your eyelids droop you listen to the rhythmic whir of the spoon against the inside of the bowl. It's a while before Nanna has something to say, but when she does it gives you pause.

     “Jade?”

     “Yes?”

     “I was wondering... if you would allow me to turn the tables and ask you a question for once....”

     “Of course.”

     “You'll have to forgive me if I don't know how to state this, since sprites are usually the ones answering the questions....”

     “What is it?”

     “How to ask this....” Nanna straightens, rubbing her chin and looking at the ceiling. “Jade, who did you live with as a girl? Who raised you?”

     Your mind goes to static. Before you know you're saying it you blurt out “Uh, define 'raised?'”

     Nanna's eyebrows raise. “Let me rephrase,” she says slowly. “Who was your guardian?”

     “I... well, I,” Your heartbeat has quickened so suddenly that it feels like it isn't beating at all. “I had a dog?”

     “And...?”

     “And....”

     “Who else did you live with?”

     “I... lived with my grandpa.”

     Nanna leans back, chest deflating with the exhale she releases.

     It would have been nice to get away with never telling her. You didn't even want Davesprite to know, but it seems somehow more unpalatable for Nanna to be privy to this. You barely know her at all – you can't gauge how she'll react if she continues to pry.

 

    It was painful, going through that house. You could handle it if it was just you, if it was just the fading acrid reek of nuclear reaction, the toppled antiques and the floors glimmering with dusty glass. The house is infinite, stretching on and on and swallowing you whole in its maw, free falling into the stomach of the cavernous tower. To have a straggler behind you weighed you down, made your knees weak with the magnitude of the house he could never understand. You didn't know what parts of the house – the eternal labyrinth containing your life – were _acceptable_ , what was _scary_ or _weird_ or best kept secret. What parts of the house aren't meant for anyone to see? What parts of you?

     It's a struggle to be self-aware, to realize how abnormal your life has been. You want to censor swaths of it, redact the years with a black marker so no one would ever have to know, would ever even ask. You want to roll back the clock, bury yourself in the silty soil, dig deep into the ocean crust and emerge somewhere in that great unfathomable thing called Civilization.

 

     “What was he like, your grandfather?” Nanna asks. Her tone is subdued, her smile a sharp little polite “U.”

    You lean across the edge of the counter into the weight of your left arm. “What was he _like_? I don't know how to answer that.”

    “Ah. I'll try again.” Nanna taps the edge of the bowl with the wooden spoon, an even beat that sprays tiny flecks of dough. “Many people have a _presence_ , if you will. Their personality seems to radiate into the room as soon as they enter. Not _all_ of us,” Nanna smiles, looking down. “I don't suppose I ever had that kind of power. But a lucky few.”

     “So, what was his 'presence' like?

     “That's one way of putting it.”

     You close your eyes.

     You are three years old, just getting the hang of walking up the sloping hills without tumbling face-first into the grass. When you look down, your brown legs are all green stains and scuff marks, your shoelaces never tied on both feet at once. You can't remember what it is that he says – only the hand that covers your whole shoulder, the booming laugh, the infinitely tall man who reaches into the sky even though he is on one knee to match your height. His features are unclear, a gray shade lined with the light of the sun his figure blocks out. You say something, reach up with one stubby arm, and he places a pith helmet on your head that falls forward and covers your eyes. You lift the brim up to see, and when he picks you up and rests you on his shoulder you can see how far the ocean goes.

 

     You link your fingers together, swaying in your seat and trying to pin down the adjectives that come crashing down on you.

    “I can't sum it up in one word. He was... like this unstoppable force that was destined to keep winding around the planet doing _something_ , discovering or inventing or... anything but staying on that island.” You open your eyes and Nanna is still, watching your face carefully. “I feel like me being there made his life screech to a halt. You can't really bring a child into jungles and deserts and underground cities, you know?”

     Nanna hides her mouth behind a contemplative fist. “Now, I'm sure that's not true. Raising children is an adventure in itself.”

     “Yes, but not the type he was accustomed to.”

     Maybe it's best not to tell her about those later years, learning about the concept of suicide and feeling certain that he had left you on purpose. A burden no longer worth the effort.

     “Jade, would you remind me what your last name is? I don't think I got it.”

     “Um, it's Harley.”

    To your surprise, Nanna barks with a sudden laugh. You stare at her, eyebrows furrowed, while she wipes away a tear. “Oh no, is it? I was hoping he wouldn't keep that name going, I _told_ him he wasn't pronouncing that dog's name right.”

     You remember the stuffed dog in the lab, a smaller and less imposing version of Becquerel, the plaque on its mount the same as your own. “What dog?”

     Nanna slaps her hand to her chest, eyes wide. “Whoops! I said too much, didn't I?” She hoots a little and adjusts her glasses by the earpiece. “I'm sorry, Jade. I was only getting you to confirm something I already suspected.”

     One of your ears flicks. “I'm confused.”

    “Just remembering something I was told a long time ago.” Nanna rests her face in her hand, smiling at you fondly. “I knew it was true once I heard that he had a sister. So at least _one_ of the things she told me had merit.”

     “Who?”

     “Oh, just a mean-spirited old witch. She isn't important, but what she told me is.” Nanna looks at you slyly, like you're in cahoots. “You see Jade, I grew up with your grandfather.”

     It's a few seconds before you recognize her meaning. “Like, as kids?”

     “Exactly as kids! We were adopted by the late, great Colonel himself.” Nanna spreads her palm in an invisible banner across the counter. “Though he didn't live for very long. We were to live without even the foggiest memory of him. A shame too, since he was reportedly the embodiment of charisma.”

     You hug yourself, leaning into the edge of the countertop. “Who raised you, then?”

     Nanna sneers. “Only his wife. You may recognize her as a household name, though in reality it was a clever guise to hoodwink the populace. She was known as Betty Crocker.”

     “Pff. Okay, I think you're kidding with me.”

    “Kidding, _me_? What ever gave you the idea I would do such a thing?”

     “So you thought you were like, brother and sister?”

     “Naturally.”

     “And Betty Crocker thought you were going to have kids?” You crinkle your nose. “Nanna, that's so gross.”

     “Well, it isn't as if I ever saw him again! The old lady's prophecy had no chance of becoming reality, as far as I could see. He ran away before we were sixteen, before I discovered the truth about our invented siblinghood. I saw him in the news, however. A nice way to keep up with his life, considering he never wrote.”

     “He really never talked to you at all?” You're compelled by her story, leaning your body far across the counter as if it'll draw the words out of her more quickly.

    “He _might_ have.” Nanna exhales through her nose. “It's impossible to tell. I suspect that if he ever tried to send me any correspondence, the witch would have burned it before it got into my hands. After a few years, maybe he took my silence as an indication of resentment.” She shrugs. “Even after Betty disappeared, I never got in touch with him. Seeing him again would have only made me sad, and at some level, the feeling may have been mutual. It would have been easy for him to swoop in on a plane or sail up in a massive ship and ask me how I was.” Nanna's eye shine. “I kept thinking it could happen, til the end. But it never did.”

     “Why would it make you sad?”

     “Simply put, I was exhausted. Once the old lady fled the coop, I just wanted to be normal. Though I never stopped missing him, if only for the validation of another person remembering my childhood torment. I wanted someone in my life who could confirm the things I had seen, the actions I had witnessed.”

     You look down at your lap, resisting the urge to pry merely because you didn't want Nanna to do so to you. It feels like she's only giving you the tip of the iceberg. “Did you like being normal?”

     “As much as one can! Some people go out of their way to make waves, to be rebellious. But I had had my fill. I was content to get married, live in a house far from the witch's manor, and see whether I could make it as an entrepreneur.”

    “It's kinda funny,” you start, wringing your palms. “You're telling me all these things about him, but I never knew much about him at all. You would think there'd be Wikipedia articles, Google results, _something_. There was a little, and I could piece together the photos and the documents he left behind in his office. I was always playing detective, but I never got the full picture.” You remember the musty smell of the aging papers in his bureaus, the meticulous boxes of photographs, everything labeled and yet impossible to form a complete timeline. “No one came to look for him, you know? Years passed, and there was no word in the media. No friends, no colleagues, no family came to search. It was like he had cut ties with everyone when we left for the island.”

     “He was a private person, as visible as he tended to be,” Nanna agrees. She looks at you steadily, expression neutral. “I take it that he died before the game?”

     “He did.”

     Nanna nods, closing her eyes like an old suspicion confirmed. “Could I ask how?” she asks softly.

     You shrug, rub your arms. “Time shenanigans. I was very young.”

     “It's always chalked up to shenanigans, isn't it?” Nanna smiles. “Even his death a great mystery to be uncovered.”

     “I guess so.”

     “I don't mean to make you feel poorly, Jade,” Nanna says suddenly. “I never had the opportunity to catch up with him, so forgive me if it seems I'm wringing you dry for answers.”

     “No, no, it's fine,” you say, waving your hand. “Actually, I feel like you've been more informative than I have. I would have never known any of that stuff, about you growing up. He was such an enigma. Thank you for letting me understand him more.”

     Nanna smiles. “An enigma... that sums it up quite perfectly. Jacob's life always seemed to be one mysterious adventure after another.”

     You stifle a laugh. “That's funny.”

     “What is?”

     “His name is the same in both universes. It's funny how things like that don't change.”

     Nanna only gives you a blank stare, and you realize that she doesn't know.

     “What do you mean, 'both universes?'”

     “Oh... didn't you know about the Scratch? I thought sprites were programmed with that knowledge.”

    Nanna raises her eyebrows. “I know _of_ the Scratch, but I don't see what you're getting at.”

     “Okay, then I guess the tables really are turning.” You stretch, leaning far back out of the stool before pulling yourself forward. “Nanna, I have to tell you something about where we're going.”

     “What's on the other side of that fenestrated wall, I take it?”

     “Yup!”

     “In that case, I'm listening.”

 

     You start your story with the first time a letter appeared without warning on your desk. You were eleven, your feet swinging above the floor in your desk chair as you sat with your face inches from a tiny mechanical window, unscrewing the panels and uncoiling wires. Bec rumbled a warning in his throat, and because you were so focused on working you didn't realize what was lying beside you until he hopped down from your bed to rear his head and sniff at the envelope.

     At first you hoped it was another letter from John, and your heart seized with excitement at the unexpected present from an ever-entangling stream of timelines. It was a letdown, then, when the letters spelling your name were sharp, elongated. Written in dark green. The flap of the envelope was tucked into the inside, the letter within folded a bit unevenly. It seemed like a long-winded introduction. The boy addressing you was clearly trying to warm up to you, if not in an aloof sort of way. It struck you as a little overbearing, like a kid in one of your roleplaying forums jumping into a thread and explaining why their dragon prince character was super cool.

     You might not have found it as strangely charming as you had if the boy hadn't called you his grandmother – but keep it a secret, okay? You zipped your lips, then tapped Bec on the head and zipped his lips, too. He asks you to write him back, gives you instructions for sending it to him in the future. You folded the letter's creases out on the edge of the table and bit your thumbnail. It wouldn't hurt to write him back. You leaned forward to smell the ink, the heavy scent that results from writing so much in so little time. It made you ache, to have this thing in front of you that had just been touched by another human. You'll write him back, you decided. You'll write back this “Jake,” this boy who is your family.

    It eases your headache regarding the timeline now to understand that Jake was simply mistaken. You _are_ his grandmother, in the adoptive sense. In another universe. But not you, not this version. The Scratch honed in on your meteor, gave you a new destination, and sent you hurdling into the turn of the century. Simple enough. Now your great enigma of a grandfather is another cog in the wheel of SBURB, a player slotted for glorious victory or miserable failure.

 

     Nanna is still while you explain all of this to her, her eyes getting more and more glazed. Once you trail off, she sighs through her nostrils and places a fist under her chin.

     “So, what I glean from all of this is that the Scratch is leading us to a brand new SBURB session.”

     “Yes.”

     “But Skaia has exchanged the meteor's paths of flight insofar that your guardians, that is to say, myself and a number of other parental figures....”

     “–Will be the players, yes. And we'll jump in to help them out!” You force a smile, try to pretend that you believe what you're saying. That the timeline won't sputter out like a pen running low on ink before you've reached the window's glass.

     Nanna exhales slowly, her fingers jittering nervously around the handle of her spoon. “Thank you for telling me this, Jade.”

     “No problem.” You cross your ankles on the barstool's footrest. “Are you okay though, Nanna? You seem kind of tense.”

     “Do I? I'm sorry, Jade. Actually, I'm quite happy!”

     “You are?”

     “Yes. Very much so.” A broad smile spreads across her face, and she plays with her sprite pendant. “Seeing you kids climb all the way to godhood, defeating those monsters and clearing all those obstacles... I was almost envious. My role was a passive one, a stepping stone for him to reach bigger and better things.” Nanna's sprite tail wisps in a curly-cue around her, a staticy cyan trail that whispers like pale fire. “To imagine myself in your place... I don't even have the words for it. She'll be a hero.” She rubs her mouth, shoulders shaking with laughter. “A version of me who grew up with computers. Now that I'd like to see!”

     You can't help but smile. Nanna's excitement is contagious. Her cheeks are tinged with a soft blue blush as she stifles her nervous laughter. “Why do you think you didn't know about this?” you ask.

     Nanna purses her lips, tucks a curl of white hair behind her ear. “That's a good question. Perhaps the game assumes that players and sprites alike won't live to see the results of the Scratch. Perhaps it doesn't bother to program that knowledge because of the inevitability of that oblivion.”

     “That makes sense. Our session was pretty unusual.”

    “That it was.” Nanna looks at you. “But Jade, how did _you_ know what the Scratch entails?”

     “Oh.” You point at your white ears. “I saw it happen, in the moments before I fled with the ship. The new portals opening, the meteors and the children they contained. It was pretty easy to infer what was happening.”

     Nanna nods. “I'll trust your word then. But can I pose you one more question?”

     “Sure.”

    “These players... surely they all _know_ each other. Did you ever catch her name, from your pen pal? Did he ever tell you about her?”

     “Jake was sort of cagey when it came to telling me about his friends, but I knew a little. All I really know for sure is that her name is Jane,” you explain. “And she likes pranks.”

    “Well! That's a relief,” Nanna laughs. “We share a name _and_ a hobby.”

 

     You look at the ground, examine the fine rusty specks on the bottom paneling of the counter. If Nanna didn't know about the Scratch, then Davesprite doesn't either. For a moment you wrestle with the concept of explaining it to him. Like you, he may already be convinced that this timeline is going nowhere, hurdling quickly into a dead end. What would be the point in telling him he could meet his brother if the game may not allow it? What would be the point in making him anticipate a reunion doomed to be erased as the last tendrils of the timeline curl up like the dead legs of a spider? You shouldn't tell him. It wouldn't be fair.

     “Nanna, do you think we could keep this between us? Like, about the players.”

     She tilts her head, studying your worry-twisted features before nodding. “Of course, dear. It'll be our secret.”

     “A personal conspiracy.”

     “I like the sound of that!” Nanna's eyes widen suddenly, smacking her hand next to the mixing bowl so forcefully that it bounces from the linoleum and spins like a coin. “Oh, but look how distracted we've gotten! This dough is going to go all sticky.”

     She tucks the bowl into her arm, materializing a new bright blue spoon out of her powers and using it to whisk the contents back into shape. Nanna returns to work with renewed fervor, a bubbling exhilaration making her movements brisk. It makes you happy to have excited her, to be able to leave her happier than she was before. Even if she's more optimistic than you. Even if she may never live to see herself mirrored in a sixteen-year-old princess of Prospit.

 

     As you continue to look at Nanna, you begin to see yourself reflected in her face. John was making a reach when he said you looked alike, as much as the sentiment meant to you. Rather, the two of you are the capricious work of ectobiology, like an impatient gamer flipping through the character customization page. If you and John had walked down the street together, it might be difficult to tell you were related. But with Nanna, there'd be no question.

    You often allowed yourself to wonder who your parents were. Something _must_ have happened to them, if your grandpa was left to raise you. But it was a distant thought, only brought to the forefront of your mind when your friends mentioned their own parents. It didn't make you sad, lying on your bed and watching cartoon movies about the love between mothers and daughters. You could hardly wish to have something you didn't understand, that you didn't have the context for. Rose was the only one of your friends with a mom, and she didn't seem to think it was that great. Still, some part of you must have wanted that connection.

     The White Queen told you that when you were so small you could hardly walk, you would grasp at her with your little hands and call her your mother. She would pick you up to keep you from tripping on your too-long dress, sweep your hair back with her doll-jointed fingers. You can't remember what would have made you mistake her identity. It isn't as though she looked anything like you, but she was maternal in her own way – her smooth voice like looping calligraphy, eyes glittering beetles containing something deeper than the black of the Medium. It hurt your eyes to see the full scope of the golden moon, and she shielded your sight with her hand so you could see the tops of the cathedrals, the spires and bridges and the countless windows. Her shell was frigid, but it must have been some comfort. You would dig your fingers into the vibrant fabric of her dress, clinging to her on the balcony overlooking the city.

    “I am not your mother,” she would say softly, her arms folded around you. “But I am your queen. And _you_ are the princess.”

     You might not have understood what she meant, but in a click of word association you asked her where your crown was, and she only laughed.

 

     “Hey Nanna?”

     “What is it, Jade?” She looks up, her eyes inches from a ring of measuring spoons where she pours out a careful tablespoon of vanilla.

     “Um... I don't know how to ask this. Would it be weird if I sorta... thought of you as my mom?”

     Nanna doesn't respond at first, her eyes going all starry. You think she might start to cry.

    “If that is not the _sweetest_ thing I've heard in years,” Nanna breathes. She closes her eyes and sniffs. “That wouldn't be weird at all, Jade. I would be honored.”

     “Ah, that's a relief.” You look at your hands, fiddling with your fingers. “I never had any idea what it would be like to have a mom. To think of myself as someone's daughter... it still sounds weird to say it out loud. But if this is what it's like,” you say, gesturing the chaos across the counter. “I think I could get used to it.”

     Nanna smiles and gives a satisfied sigh. “I was content for you to only see me as someone else's grandmother. I'm glad I've been promoted!” she laughs.

    “Yeah, I get what you mean.” You cross your arms across the table, resting your cheek on them. “I spent so long calling my grandpa, well, my _grandpa,_ that it's strange to suddenly consider him my dad. It's different for you, though, since we just met.”

     “It's almost unbelievable. I've only been around for about a week, and I've been resurrected, lost an arm, and gained a child!” Nanna chuckles. “I wonder if it will be different this time around. I was quite the overbearing parent, if you can believe it.”

     “No, I can't. You seem pretty relaxed to me.”

     “I'm glad I can at least convey that image. In actuality, I'm always concerned for my children.” Nanna stares at some far-off point. “Perhaps I was projecting the fears of my own childhood onto my first son. He was an only child, and I was always terrified something would happen to him. When he went off to Bellevue, I cried for days – can you believe it? It was only a few hours away.”

     “Are you afraid now?”

     Nanna looks at you, and it feels as though she sees the same resemblance you've already noticed. “Maybe a little,” she admits, holding her index and thumb a bit apart. “Just don't disappear on me, all right?"

     Your cheeks warm. “All right. I promise.”

     “Then that's settled, isn't it?” Nanna twirls her sprite pendant. “As an induction ceremony into this prestigious family tree, I propose that you get over here and help me finish baking!”

     “Aw geez, but I'll probably just mess something up!”

    “No buts!” Nanna drifts to your side of the counter, pulling you out of your barstool and pushing you in front of her to the other side. “It's never too late to learn. Come on – here, you take _this_ bowl, and we can make it a tiered cake!”

     “The carapacians would love to get their hands all over that.”

     “And they will, I'm sure. This will be the... twentieth cake? Yes, the twentieth they've devoured in no time flat. The big two-oh! We'll make it special.”

     “Can it have green icing?”

     “I'm limited to blue, sadly, but I'm sure there's yellow frosting around here that we can use to alchemize us a nice green.”

 

     You lose track of the hours, mimicking Nanna's instructions and watching her out of the corner of your eye to make sure you're doing everything correctly. She hums when the work lulls into monotony, a low and lilting sound that echoes in the steel walls. Very soon, you find your arms being speckled by bits of flour, and Nanna laughs at you as she tries to brush some of it out of your bangs.

     “That's the true sign of a beginner – half in the bowl, half on your person!”

     It's easy to understand why Nanna seems to live in the kitchen. The routine relieves you, dulls your nerves and refocuses your anxieties into simple productivity. Like gardening used to, if you still had the energy. You're so concentrated on following Nanna's orders that everything that had kept you up in the atrium is mere background radiation.

 

     “Do you think we could do this more often? Like, if I ever stopped by would you be able to find something for me to do?” You pause with a mixing bowl in your arm, your stirring arm getting a bit sore.

     “I think that can be arranged,” says Nanna. She flicks a speck of egg white off of your hand. “I wouldn't protest having some help around here.”

     “You seem to like being in here, though.”

    “Oh, I do! It's not a _chore_ by any means.” Nanna reaches into a drawer under one of the stoves and pulls out a few clattering cake pans. “I like to keep busy! I never really allotted myself any free time in life – doing this keeps me grounded, keeps me from getting my head in the clouds.”

     “I get what you mean.”

     “And it doesn't hurt that we're also providing something for those charming chess folk to eat,” Nanna continues, squeezing the pans into the inches of free space on the linoleum. “It lets you know that your efforts aren't wasted.”

 

     While your Big Two-Oh cake sits in the oven, you and Nanna recline in the barstools. It's early morning now, but the halls outside are still silent. Soon, the early risers of Prospit will speckle the hallways, while the Dersites may wait until early afternoon to show their heads. Your arms ache in a good sort of way, and as you sit back you spin the stool back and forth. Nanna sits opposite to you, backs to each other as you lean against the counter's edges. The inactivity makes your eyelids heavy, and the sleep you've missed out on works its way back into the forefront of your mind. You yawn.

     “Tired?”

     You smack your lips. “I've been awake all day.”

     “If you'd like to go to bed, I won't hold you hostage here.”

     “No, it's fine. I'll hold out.” You rub your eyes. Nanna coasts around to reseat herself beside you.

     “Couldn't sleep, hmm? I wondered why you would come slinking around here at that time of night.”

     “Yeah....” You lean against Nanna's shoulder, covering a yawn with your hand. “I just finished fixing a bunch of destruction dealt to my house during the game. It was pretty tiring. I should have been able to fall asleep pretty quickly, but I just kept overthinking.”

     Nanna rests her cheek against your hair. The earpiece of her glasses brushes one of your Bec ears. “Have you spoken about this with Davesprite?”

     You exhale through your nose, your chest feeling suddenly heavy. “A little. I don't know. I don't think either of us really wants to talk about anything for too long. It still feels like it just happened.” Nanna nods.

    “I don't want to spend my first official day as your mother giving you lectures,” she starts. Her voice is softer. “But if _I_ were you, I would try to fix that. You spend enough time together to quit the jokesterism and take care of each other,” she teases, pinching your cheek until you squawk with protest and swat her ghost hand away.

    “It's not _that_ much time,” you grumble.

     “Oh Jade, you're so bad at lying that you don't even sound like you've convinced yourself!” Nanna hoots. “I think if I ever saw my son spending that much time with a girl, I'd remove his door from its hinges.”

    You hide your face in your hands, cheeks burning. “ _Nanna_.”

    “Am I _embarrassing_ you, Jade? That's what moms are for!” She gives you a gentle slap on the back, clearly enjoying her ascended status from being just “John's grandma.”

     “No, I'm not _embarrassed_ ,” you say in an exaggerated voice. “It's not anything that needs to be read into. I just. I don't know.”

     Nanna stays quiet while you search for words. A metal coil in the stove pops with heat.

     “We lost our friend,” you murmur. “I keep wondering if maybe we did something wrong, that the denizens are punishing us for some misstep.” You close your eyes, your First Guardian vision sweeping once more over the dark scene of the atrium. Davesprite has stretched out in your absence, rolled onto his stomach with his left wing spread over the sheets. Still asleep. You exhale. “If something else happens, I. I don't want to be alone.”

     Nanna sweeps your bangs from your face, and when you look up at her, her eyes are narrow with dolor. “You're never alone,” she says, pecking you on the forehead. “You need to understand that.”

     “I know.”

     “Does he?”

     You sigh and go back to leaning on her shoulder. “Maybe.”

     “Maybe 'yes?'”

     You shrug.

     “Or maybe 'no?'”

     “Maybe maybe.”

    “Well, whatever the nature of the 'maybe' _may_ _be_ ,” Nanna says, patting your shoulder to get you off of her, “You should pass on the knowledge for me.” She glides to the stove, which begins squalling to announce the end of its countdown.

     “Like how?”

     Nanna opens the oven. Heat rolls out, and she waves her hand in front of her face when her glasses steam up. “Tell the truth. If you're so worried that doom will befall you, there's nothing else to do but make sure you're on the same page with your loved ones.” Immune to the heat of the pan, Nanna's reaches her hand unprotected into the oven and pulls them out. They continue to steam, and Nanna wipes her hand on her hip in satisfaction. “Simply put, your biggest enemy right now is keeping your feelings hidden.”

     You consider her words. It's true that you haven't told Davesprite everything, that letting him see you in a brief moment of vulnerability makes your skin crawl all over. But Nanna's advice has merit. If the timeline fizzles out soon, you want him to know everything. You want him to know how grateful you are that fate allowed for him to be here, how grateful you are that he hasn't pinned the blame on you as you have for yourself. You would be more inclined to do so if you were certain you'd be reciprocated, but with him there's never a guarantee that what you're hearing is close to the truth. It'll be a constant work in progress.

 

     “You're probably right.”

    “I _know_ I'm right,” Nanna winks. “Now, get back over here. We need to find your green icing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was the longest so far and ds doesnt talk at all..... dunk'd on by nanna once again
> 
> nanna doesnt get the spotlight in this as much as she probably should, but thats just the way it worked out. ill stay salty forever that she didnt bond with her ectobabies on screen tho, so rest assured that the one-on-one scenes wont end here


	12. Chapter 12

     You wake up with the cobweb of some fast-fading dream clinging to the back of your mind. You grasp at the last images of it – a rush of cool air, a hand on your shoulder – but in seconds it all melts away. It feels as though you were about to say something, to respond to something of some dire importance, and so as you stare at the ceiling there is an unease that lingers in your throat.

     As your breathing settles, you're surprised by an attack dealt to your personal space by a tiny hummingbird, its purple wings buzzing as it circles your face. Maybe it mistakes you for family. You squawk and swat it away, and the little bird retreats to the safety of some toppled-over flowerpots. When your hand brushes your face, you feel that your forehead is beaded with sweat. Or whatever the sprite equivalent of sweat is.

 

     Though the noise of the rainforest below tells you it's day, the planet is still plunged in darkness. You guess Jade never turned the lights back on in her room. She must still be asleep. You sweep your arm out across the sheets to nudge her awake, but nothing is there. Unfurling your left wing in confusion, you find that the feathers don't detect anything but empty bed sheets. Your heart tightens when you move your head and see that she's gone.

     Suddenly you're seized with panic, your double-doomed status crashing down and engulfing you. You remember the black scorch on the carpet, the all-powerful denizen that had ruptured his planet into shards within seconds. This timeline, this planet could crumble around you at any moment. And you are alone. The room spins as you sit yourself fully upright.

 

     “Jade?” Your voice is rough with the cotton of sleep. “Are you in here?”

     No answer. LOFAF hums with the rhythmic din of a colony of frogs.

     “Fuck. Okay.” You slump out of bed, yanking yourself out by grabbing one of the bedposts. A sudden nausea takes hold of you. “So I guess I'm home alone. That's fine. That's great. We forgot Kevin! He'll probably be okay, it's not like he's gonna get nuked by a giant lizard while we're getting the patdown in fucking France.” You hang your head, swallowing bile.

 

     She didn't say anything when what would have been dusk fell last night. It wasn't as though she had an abundance of clean couches to offer. You think she's catching onto the fact that you're unwilling to maintain a greater than twenty yard distance from her. If this planet blows, you'd hate to face the music by yourself. So you perched at the end of her bed, nonchalant, while she yawned and paced and braided her hair back. You chatted her up while she got increasingly tired, her eyelids drooping and her head nodding while she murmured agreements and weak laughter. Then she was asleep, and you were free to curl up for yourself. The perfect crime.

     Eventually, though, you'll have to admit to yourself how uncomfortable this is. Your left wing blankets you, but it's not really enough. You hunch up into yourself at the footboard, curling your arms and wing close so that nothing touches even the edges of Jade's legs. You're like a nervous lapdog, and you're sure it looks pathetic. But you'd sooner saw your arm off than sleep anywhere else.

     Maybe she noticed you were still asleep and thought it a good opportunity to get away from you.

 

     The house is impossibly quiet. Your room was never like this – periods of silence were still outlined with the nonstop rumble of traffic, and the absence of human activity upon entering the game set you on constant edge. The leaves of a miniature apple tree brush your tail as you float into the heart of the atrium, and you decide to wrestle with a tiny branch to get one of its apples. You take a bite, but it doesn't taste anything like apple juice. Typical.

     It's more eerie here without Jade to make light of the destruction. It would make a good photography series, like those guys who bust into abandoned hospitals and warehouses to take creepy pictures. You remember the secret rooms, the countless floors you skipped on the way up here. Below you is a chain of curtained-off floors, somehow so awful that even the frank and unabashed Jade didn't want you to see them.

     She was probably being melodramatic. Honestly, there really isn't anything that would surprise you at this point. And if anything down there _did_ give you cause for alarm, well, at least you still have some things left to discover about yourself.

     Essentially, you decide to snoop. If Jade happens to be down there anywhere, then bonus points for you. You run your hands over the sheets to find your phone, then tuck it into the bandages wrapped at your side. All set for adventure.

 

     You circle the transportalizer and eye the stairwell leading into the dark. It yawns into a spiraling black, a cold draft rising out. You drift down slowly, the long feathers of your left wing brushing the cool white walls. The stagnant air makes you shudder violently. Halfway down (you think?) you're stricken with doubt, want to return to your post before Jade can tell you're giving yourself a free ticket to all of her house's attractions. Maybe she can see you now and is waiting to see if you go through with it.

     “Jade?” you call again. Just to be sure.

     Nothing.

     “This is what happens when you leave the kids unattended,” you say half to yourself. “They run around and wreck the store.” You pause. “Not to insinuate that I'm gonna wreck anything,” you blurt out as an addendum. Just to be sure.

 

     The stairs take you down for what feels like miles. Or maybe you just float really slowly. Eventually it dispenses you in a circular room, broad and dark and empty. The carpet smells stale. You're only able to see anything because of the thin wisps of light that peek around the edges of the blackout curtains – probably to keep the room from mildewing, or the designs on the rug from fading out. The draft is stronger here, and you shiver. Nothing to see. You continue down the stairwell.

     Which leads you down into a room just like the previous.

     Which leads you down into _another_ identical room.

     On and on the tower stretches downward. Alice falling down the rabbit hole, if you were inclined towards Rose's brand of metaphor. The only room of any marked difference has one uncovered window, the curtain rod hanging precariously from where someone ripped the drapes down. You can see through the glass that you're still rather high off the ground. You continue down the stairwell.

 

     You coast into a room with a gray slate floor, the tiles slick. The space is cramped compared to the wide and rounded rooms above, crowding you with stone walls and shining columns. You hover over the transportalizer, the first one in the house you've seen since the atrium. It's not as chilly here – warm air, you notice, is rising from the stairs below like from a manhole cover. This room looks like some sort of trophy gallery – animal heads and mounted beasts line the walls and litter the floor. Antelopes with spiraling horns, bears with snouts frozen in roars, furry oxen and snarling wolves and blank-eyed sharks. Even some creatures that look stitched together – the front of a goat, the back of a fish, some sort of deer with a humanoid shape. Did he buy these for novelty or sew them together himself? You can't help yourself from sneering.

     Maybe rooms like this are what made Jade a furry. You wonder how she must feel about her grandpa being such a relentless animal slayer. Once, you messaged her after being gone a few minutes, explaining that you had to smash a big-ass spider that was hanging out in the corner of your ceiling. Within seconds she was scolding you for not letting it outside of your window instead. She probably appreciates the wolf heads least of all.

     Two halls stretch into darkness, seemingly clear of the debris rampant in here. You squint in the dim light, but you can't tell where the hall ends or what could be beyond it. Maybe you should keep going.

 

     As you drift down the next stairs, you can see that the room below is lit with a soft orange ambiance. When you make it in the space below, you examine yourself and see that the light has made you look completely orange, though that's not much of an achievement. Glancing up, your ruff fluffs up in a brief moment of instinctual fear of the human figures looming around you – this room is full of suits of armor. They tower in various poses, one of them in the middle of swinging a sword precariously fixed to its hand. Lining the walls above them are rows of shining shields. Their crests of lions and griffins glint with an outline of orange. Oh – and more fucking animal heads, that's nice you guess.

     You can't will your feathers to settle. Against your better judgment you expect one of these suits to spring to life, to draw one of their longswords with clumsy uncanny valley arms and undo all of Jade's stitches in a single slash. Some of them look brand new, silver almost like shiny aluminum, while others are more tarnished and antiquated. You rub your arms, gaze drifting around the room – wait, is that fucking Iron Man? There is a fucking authentic Iron Man suit in this god damn room. You pinch the bridge of your nose. Stick to the standard Harley Manor rule: Don't Ask Questions.

     You approach one suit, breath uneven in your throat. Its visor is drawn shut, black slits betraying no face. You tap the hollow chest with one talon. _Clunk, clunk, clunk_. Two inhuman knights.

 

     Are you a knight anymore? Maybe you're the Sprite of Time. You don't think having a god tier title really applies if you're not able to ascend anymore. You could have, _maybe_ , if you had had time. If you hadn't been so inexplicably drawn to Skaia in the last hours, you could have woven into the core of Derse, found your quest crypt, and ended your career as a spirit guide right then. But the game treated Jadesprite as a proper dream self, didn't it? Maybe it would have classified you as the designated replacement – as good a body as any, except for some missing parts. In a flash of bright yellow sure to floor anyone who was there to witness it, Dave would have ascended wherever he was with an ostentatious wingspan copy-pasted onto his back. Your memories would be buried in a subconscious cubbyhole, your wings used to carry him through the dank underbelly of a pitch black laboratory. It's too late for that now. Just as well. He doesn't have a right to your experiences anyway.

     You wonder what he's doing right now. It makes you feel like a child, the bitter feeling that stews in your stomach. You're not exactly jealous of the junkyard meteor Dave is calling home; Jade made it sound disgusting. You are envious, however, of the company he keeps – not the trolls, _especially_ not the blind one, but your sister. Rose must have forgotten you by now. You fully expect to be wiped from her long-term memory, but nevertheless the idea makes you ill. Are your experiences valid if no one else remembers?

     Jade tells you the clothing for heroes of Light is orange and yellow. Maybe the color will keep you in the periphery of her thoughts. As much as you'd like to convince yourself of the opposite, you'd hate to be replaced.

     Dave is so _unaware_ of everything that's happened. You feel like gloating. What a horrible surprise he'll be in for if you make it to the next session.

 

     You've been staring into the hollow face of this knight for several minutes. One of its metal joints settles with small crack, and your wing extends with a frightened caw, feathers brushing a taxidermy fox. Time to haul ass out of here.

 

     The room below the Hall of Knights is so fluorescently pink that you feel like you're in some sort of decrepit cabaret. You say “decrepit” because this gray-tiled space is sprawling with ancient mummies, some in their sarcophagi, some enjoying the fresh air. One of them stares at you with a grimace carved into its gray, raisin-like face, and you look away, somehow embarrassed. A couple knights and mounted antelope stand guard in the corners. Jade's grandpa must have had a poor sense of organization.

     “This is some _Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not_ bullshit,” you mutter half to yourself, half to a gnarled mummy with its arms curled inward. You don't linger long on any of their faces, nostrils flaring from the stench they give off.

     Everything smells so _stale_. It's beyond the smell of death, like all of the rancid gases escaped from these mummies' tombs and have been left in here to stew. You wonder why it hasn't infected the rest of the house, or at least why you didn't smell it in the stairwell.

     A stout sarcophagus makes eye contact with you from across the room, its face sparkling gold and fuchsia. You clasp a hand to your mouth, on the verge of gagging. There are no doubts in your mind – _this_ is what Jade was picturing when she thought you couldn't handle her house. She might have been right after all.

     There is nothing to dwell on here. You continue your descent.

 

     The tower never ends. You can't imagine having lived here alone, years stretching on with these _things_ , these completely out of context hints at a life Jade could never be a part of. What did she feel, walking these rooms and seeing these reminders of the cut-short life of her only guardian? Your apartment felt like a trap room closing in on all six sides, like some sort of Indiana Jones booby trap, but this feels like a labyrinth – like you could wander for days and find no sign of life. Trapped in the Minotaur's maze, waiting for the monster around the corner. The back of your neck prickles.

 

     Further below it becomes cool again, a crispness aided by the gentle blue light that shines in from the outgoing hallways. It makes the whole place seem like a department store frequented mostly by middle aged PTA moms. You didn't really think about it before, but what is the point of all this mood lighting? There doesn't seem to _be_ anything down those halls, a blinding light emitting from some far off point that makes you squint even with your shades. Is it fire? Are they light bulbs that Jade has to replace? In any case, you can tell why the light in here is blue. Jade wasn't lying about the extra stash of salon posters. There's mounds of them in here – covering, of course, additional overflow of decaying mummies and valiant knights.

     These things kind of smell like the basement of your apartment building after it rained really hard a few years back. The landlord's stash of old newspapers from the forties had to dry out, waterlogged, for weeks afterward. You're not sure why he had to keep them all tied up by all the laundry shit, but maybe having them in his apartment would have made him look like a basket case. You associate that damp, papery smell with being in the cold cellar, fumbling with the lint filter in the dryer and wondering if it really mattered whether the water in the washer was hot or cold. It felt like you spent hours in there at a time, just _figuring out_ what you were supposed to be doing while headlines proclaiming the election of FDR filled your nose with a sickly smell like mildew. Sometimes a person from a different floor would come down with a full hamper, and you would just mimic whatever they were doing by glancing at them out of the corner of your eye.

     Paired with the smell, this room is a mini time capsule, thrown out to sea so that future generations might see how the modern eighties woman lived. The poster in front of you is somewhat unclear in the corners, huge blots of water damage washing the ink out in uneven ovals. The lady in it has shoulder pads in her blazer that make her look like a football player, her light hair in tight curls. The look on her face says that the photographer gave her short notice before snapping the shot. Despite the paper's curling up like an accordion, you can still tell how clumped her mascara is. But maybe that was just in vogue at the time.

 

     You run your fingers absentmindedly along the cardboard backing of a poster propped against an upside-down sarcophagus. To your surprise, this place jars you most of all. The antique knights and the plunders from pyramids you could understand, with Grandpa Harley being a legendary globetrotter extraordinaire. _This_ , though, is so ridiculous you can't keep the goofy smile off your face. You can picture it now: Grandpa H. using his tomb raiding expertise to rope himself down into some rundown old beauty salon – still wearing safari gear despite being in the middle of the city – stashing the posters under his arm, and escaping through the ceiling in the dead of night. Of course, he could have just bought them. But you like the idea of them being swiped.

     You wonder what he was like when he was alive. Oftentimes you would mull over what kind of off-their-rocker old man could be responsible for Jade being as weird as she was. Though you knew his last name and his supposed achievements, you were never really able to scrounge up anything from Google. For brief moments of doubt that made you feel bad for doubting your friend, you wondered if she was actually making everything up. It seems you were mostly mistaken – Jade is considerably less weird than her guardian, even well-adjusted for her living conditions. You owe her some apologies.

 

     As comfortable as it compared to this room's predecessors, the prickling feeling of being watched by so many sun-bleached eyes is starting to bother you.

     “Sorry ladies,” you mumble, throwing your hands up in a shrug at a picture of a woman whose face is framed by her Afro. “It's been fun, but I gotta hover in contemplative silence somewhere else.”

     They grin at you in vacant understanding.

 

     Back down the stairwell. The dark stairs contain a salty scent that brings you back to the beachy smell that lingered on Jade's skin. You must be closing in on the ground level if you can detect traces of the Pacific now. With the endless stretch of unfurnished rooms and crammed-full exhibits of museum rejects behind you, you think you're sure to find something more normal below.

     Psyche.

     The sound that comes out of you makes you sound like a bona fide full-blooded fucking crow. Your hand flies to your chest, meaning to pull your sword from its skeletal hilt before realizing that it's gone – fuck, you lost it on LOWAS, didn't you? You're left doing what looks like a frantic interpretive dance for a few seconds until, finally, you realize that the Typheus in front of you isn't alive.

 

     Not alive, or not even real? The effigy-or-corpse towers to the top of the room, its plaster-cast head brushing the ceiling and making it slump forward as though looming over you. The bulk of its scaled body blocks the white surface of another transportalizer. Its skin looks real enough, you think. The scales are a desaturated green in the low lighting, some of them bent out of shape and discolored, halfway flaking off. You suppose it could be some sort of underling, or at least a fucked up oversized anaconda. Its face is awkward, eyes blank and mouth cast in what looks like more of an uncomfortable grimace than a snarl. Aren't snakes supposed to have snouts? You wonder if this guy got its head lopped off in whatever jungle river it came out of, and Grandpa Harley just got a shoddy replacement head instead of sewing the old one back on. A row of torches along the floor must have given this serpent a menacing shadow, but the fire with which they were lit has gone out.

     Jade must have _loved_ having this thing in the house. If you grew up with anything similar as a little kid, you're pretty sure you'd never recover. Its tail extends into the darkness, curling in tight S-shaped waves as it fades from sight. No way to tell how big it is. You loop around the fake Typheus a couple times just to poke the scales curiously.

 

     You've reached the bottom of the stairs, so you have no choice but to go down one of the pitch-black hallways and hope it leads you somewhere that won't cause you to trip headfirst into a pile of wrinkled mummies. And yes, you _can_ still trip – the universe's need to drop you into embarrassing situations is not abated by a loss of legs. You keep your palm to the wall, which seems to sweat from the damp air of the planet outside. Your talons hiss along its rough texture. The black hall gives way to gray light, and – ah, back to the grand foyer. You wondered fleetingly where the single doorway led to the first time you were here. Now you know. It was just a nice space for a giant reptile to relax.

 

     Nothing has changed since you've arrived. The two of you have stayed in the atrium for most of your time here, and Jade was so quick to show you up that you don't think you've really gotten a feel for this space. Deliberately, you turn your back to the mantel, but you can still feel Jade's unseeing eyes on you from her spot atop the fireplace. Your spine tingles.

     You admit defeat to the godforsaken lack of lighting and push your sunglasses up into your hair, blinking and squinting in the gloom. It feels weird, not having the filter of black over everything. Like the equivalent of walking around in public without pants. Okay, maybe not that extreme, but still. You've gotten especially used to it since you've started hanging out with Jade again. There's scarcely a free moment to remove them.

     You can assess the room in clearer detail now, at least. Something bright glints by the door, and you see as you drift closer that it's Jade's god tier shoes. They look like she kicked them off quickly, flipped onto their sides and covered with dried mud. Some of the gems still shine. It's too bad Jade ditched the Witch garb – it would have been funny to make _Wizard of Oz_ jokes at her. Does she even know how funny her outfit was? At least SBURB has a sense of humor.

     Your eyes stay downcast, staring at the floor so you don't have to look up at the mantel. Only a couple of Old Man Harley's globes are still here, surviving teleportation nonsense and your night of interior decorating. One of them is knocked down, displaying a horizontal watercolor Africa. And those _fucking_ knights. Only a few remain. Two of them have collapsed in heaps, their armor dull. No mummies, thankfully.

     They went unnoticed the first time you were here, probably because some sort of shenanigans have knocked them to the floor from their mounts on the wall, but the carpet is littered with several severed heads of unprototyped underlings. You do a double-take, make a pathetic, confused sound, then float over to try to pick one up. Just so you know your eyes don't deceive you. A black basilisk head is bolted to a slick wooden plaque, surprisingly light in your hands. Its eyes are glass, tongue like stiff leather where it lolls out of its mouth. An ogre head lies by your feet, its tusks keeping it propped up in its upside-down position. One of the tusks have cracked from the impact; you can see the dark silhouette on the wall from where it fell. _This_ you have to ask Jade about later – you can only wave your hand at so much bizarre bullshit before your need to ask annoying roundabout questions takes the wheel. Your fingers brush the rough skin of the basilisk's jaw, and you drop it with a dull thud, disgusted.

 

     The head bounces slightly, its rounded face making it roll a bit before thumping against the floor paneling. You start to turn away, but pause at the sound of something thunking inside of the wall. It's mechanical, like a great lock unlatching itself. It comes as a dull surprise when a door-shaped hole appears in the Victorian wallpaper and folds away – a secret swiveling-bookcase door without the bookcase.

     You've been so numbed by what you've seen so far that you don't react at all.

 

     You hover in the doorway with your hand on the wall, running your fingertips over the bubbles in the wallpaper and smelling the strong scent of paper, leather, and mahogany that brews in the office. Being caught by Jade is no longer a worry for you. At this point, you only want answers. The room detects your movement. As you drift inside, two gas-lit lamps mounted on the wall roar to life. Everything becomes engulfed by shadow – shadows of ornately carved globes, of bookcases stretched to the ceiling and glass-paneled cabinets full of small antiques and skeletons, of a massive wooden desk that sits at the far wall, symmetrically framed by the wrought iron lamps. There are no knights in here, no posters or mummies or taxidermy monstrosities. There are a few mounted buck heads, sure, and the floor is decorated by a massive bear rug – the first real life bear rug you've ever seen – but you think this room actually passes as normal. Grandpa Harley's private study just looks like that of a studious and worldly old man.

     There's so much to browse through that you're immediately overwhelmed. The room smells like how you'd expect a country club to smell. At any moment you anticipate a guy in a pink polo and visor to come in and ask you for your member card. The hidden door folds shut behind you, and you hardly flinch.

 

     You swoop around the desk, feeling the faded green leather where an old calendar displays the page for December 1999. Grandpa Harley's handwriting is almost unreadable, all sharp cursive loops like an MS Word font. Nothing much was planned here. The first of the month is circled a couple of times. He probably used the quill and inkstand to write it all. You pick up the inkstand and shake it, but no sloshing comes. The ink is all dried up. Your wing brushes the wheeled armchair, causing it to rotate lazily in place.

     You open every drawer on the desk that you can find. Most of them only clunk heavily, refusing to give way due to being locked. The long drawer directly under the desk's surface, however, slides open with a hiss. Inside is a pile of moleskin journals, all with loose paper sticking out of the sides. You pull one out. It's a splotchy brown, the corners damaged and the spine faded from bumping around. You unwind the string holding the journal closed, and a few pages drift out onto the desk. Smoothing them out with your palms, you can see that they're mostly ink diagrams and drawings, tiny and hurried notes written in the unoccupied niches. One of them is clearly a fenestrated wall. Four of them, actually. Below is a sketch of what seems to be some cathedral windows. You turn it over and furrow your brow. There are sketches of carapacians, Prospitian logos, and a detailed drawing of one of the dream towers, its single window small and black.

     Grandpa Harley's captions are illegible to you, but there are many elongated and excited exclamation points mixed in. It looks as though he wrote them without a surface underneath, holding the notebook in his hand and writing the best he could. You set the loose pages down and flip through the soft pages of the journal itself, skimming blueprints for recreations of transportalizers and studies of individual chess people. Their faces are curious, jointed hands in tenuous waves. A bust of the White Queen is more composed, as though she was actually posing. Beside her, a sketch of her husband's scepter. You feel dizzy.

     This notebook was pulled out from underneath another. You thumb through that one as well, slightly older and containing much more earthly notes on the temple that once stood not far from Jade's house. Runes are drawn, tentative guesses at their translations taken. Whole pages are filled top to bottom with failed translation attempts. Some sketches of frogs. Many question marks. Further in, you find notes on a trench deep into the temple that he evidently uncovered on accident. The writing is smaller, more focused. He marvels at what appears to be the tips of two buried monuments deep in the earth – one purple, one gold. He plans to rope himself down there and dig up what lies beneath. A massive pedestal, perhaps? The triangular inscriptions on them clearly compel him – they're recreated in the margins a few times, scribbled out until he gets the lines perfect.

     So that's how he got all that stuff. You snap the moleskin shut and dump them all back into the drawer, feeling like an itch has been scratched at last. You won't have to bother Jade anymore. She probably wouldn't want to talk about it anyway. Does she even know this room exists?

 

     The bookcases are so meticulously labeled, rows of color-coded and Roman-numerated volumes on anthropology and archaeology almost overfilling the shelves. With one talon, you point through three shelves full of snakeskin photo storage boxes, each one dated. You skim the few index cards you can actually read in the lamplight.

 

 _Madagascar – 1956_  
_Cairo – 1961_  
_Roxanne – Graduation 1986_  
_Joey – Recitals 1989-1991_  
_Mongolia – Dec.1991-Apr.1992_  
_Roxanne – Graduation 1992_  
_Machu Picchu – 1993-1994_  
_Jade – 1995-1996_  
_Jade – 1996-1997_  
_Jade – 1997-1998_  
_Jade – 1998-_  
_Miscellaneous_

 

     The “Miscellaneous” box piques your interest. You persuade it from the shelf, shimmying it out with both hands. Popping the lid open, you smell a burst of yellowed paper and dust. It's so overflowing with crap that you just pull something out at random. What you unveil turns out to be a review for a joke shop in Washington that was snipped out of a newspaper. Boring. Another newspaper clipping juts from the stack, its corner crumpled from having the box closed on top of it. This one was folded over due to its size, a headline from November 1939 proclaiming the missing person status of a Missus Bethany “Betty” Crocker. The photograph is grainy. Betty's black hair curls around her ears, her lips dark with lipstick. You think she's wearing probably more gold (or silver?) necklaces than needed.

     Nothing in here seems particularly compelling. You toss it on top of the pile and squeeze the box back into place.

 

     You could also snoop through the Jade photos while you're at it. You choose the most recent one, a box that simply says " _Jade – 1998-._ ” Unfinished, the last on the shelf. It's lighter compared to the rest, and you can hear the photos sliding around when you take it out and set it on the desk. You open it and see that they're all upside-down, the row of pictures falling forward and dispersing through the bottom of the box. Lowering yourself into the squishy desk chair, you pick one of them at random and turn it over.

     It's a fuzzy, sepia picture of Jade, her dog, and her grandfather. An outdoor shot, a stretch of bare hills and the edge of the ocean visible in the background. You wonder what type of antique camera he used to shoot this. Your eyes are drawn directly to the imposing figure in the shot. You can't say you're surprised by his appearance. Despite his age, Jade's grandpa has broad shoulders and a stony face, whatever smile he gives obscured by his black mustache. The sunlight in front of them casts a glint across his glasses that make them appear pure white. His graying hair is tussled from the pith helmet he was wearing a moment ago, but which now sits on Jade's head. His brown hand rests on top of it, keeping the oversized hat out of Jade's eyes. He kneels on one knee, Jade sitting on one of his upper legs. Her legs dangle off of him, her legs too short to reach the ground.

     Jade is either three or four in this photo. Her hair doesn't even reach her shoulders yet, a thick puff of hair that her grandpa has only somewhat successfully pulled into a side ponytail. The tips of her tiny sneakers are barely visible under a long skirt, its hems lined with mud and grass stains. Her glasses are lopsided on her face, her smile unsure as if wondering when the camera will finally go off. She doesn't look at the camera directly, distracted by the dog that sits below her. Becquerel lies at Grandpa Harley's feet, his paws neatly folded, his tongue lolling out in what looks like a polite smile. His white fur hides his eyes.

     You remember what Jade told you about her grandfather, the few bits of information that she was willing to tell you before changing the subject completely. The man in this photograph will die in less than two years. You wonder if she even remembers this photo being taken.

 

     There are very few pictures of you as a child. Your brother was not a keepsake-collecting kind of person by any means. Sometimes he would snap a quick iPhone picture of you after a prank, like after a bucket full of Smuppets fell off of the door and onto your head after walking into the living room. But you never saw any of them after they were taken, and you don't know why he bothered to take them. Maybe one day he was going to compile an ironic photo album, full of floral card stock and blurry pictures of you looking anything between indignant and horrified.

     The fact that there are _multiple_ boxes in here of Jade's childhood makes you feel strange. A prickling feeling nags at the back of your mind. Was your bro just not sentimental, or did he not care to record your growing up? When you “graduated” sixth grade, your school made you bring in a baby picture for the “befores and afters” in the yearbook. Once you told him about it, he had to search through his server for close to an hour before he could find anything remotely suitable. You had to give your homeroom teacher a printed-out photo of you at two years old, looking nearly in tears with Lil Cal's long arms around your neck. Your teacher only sighed and tucked it into a manila folder.

 

     He never showed up again in your own timeline, absolutely impossible to keep track of. Your texts went unanswered, and if he ever came back to your apartment while you were gone, you were never able to tell. As the days passed, you weren't even sure you missed him. Although Calsprite kept you on your toes, he only showed up once in a while. You could move through the apartment freely, passing through doors without the slightest fear of what might lunge at you or fall on top of you without warning. Sometimes you still flinched out of habit, though. It was hard what to call your feelings upon seeing him again. Maybe relief, but also a fair amount of fright. He didn't have anything to say about your wings. Or your lack of legs. Or the sword sticking out of your chest. You were still just Dave to him, and that worked for you. As long as you were able to help him fight Jack, you guess it didn't really matter to him what you looked like.

 

     You spin around in the desk chair, then immediately get nauseous and stop with your back against the desk. Though Jade can't help it, your skin still sort of crawls every time she uses her dog powers. You wouldn't know how to tell her how you feel when you see that green fire, the electrical smell it causes once something is teleported or moved around or altered in size.

     The neon fire on LOWAS burned like the Green Sun, a wall of roaring flame that engulfed all three of you. Jack was... _creepy_. He had a gangling and thin body that tended to slouch forward, like he was always about to get on four legs and charge at you. That look about him was worsened once he acquired the face of Jade's hellhound, his legs almost like haunches. It was like watching someone in a movie turn into a werewolf. His wings were bigger than yours, and when they fully unfurled once more, he looked like a black silhouette against the fire. Your sword would just graze the surface of his hard chest before he would disappear, rematerializing behind you in a flash of lightning.

     You don't know how long the battle lasted. You were out of breath in seconds, simply trying not to die. And then your brother went down, his hand pressed to his chest as he stumbled back. It was the first time you ever saw him look afraid, his mouth open to show gritted teeth. He turned to face you slightly, his fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt. His sunglasses gleamed chartreuse, and before he could say anything he was... well.

     At first you expected him to get back up, like this was all some sort of elaborate rouse. But he didn't, and you could only stare, and while you were distracted with your fingers loose around your sword's hilt, Jack sliced off your wing in one motion.

     You didn't even scream, could only cough up the shining yellow stuff that sputtered out of your throat. You doubled over, and when he gouged your torso with his gold-and-red-stained sword you barely felt it. He kicked off into the air and fled the burning planet while you lie in your blood, breathing shallowly and hugging yourself tight. Your vision hazy and your cheek in the spreading puddle of radioactive gold, you could see him in your periphery. One arm stretched out unnaturally, fingers curling.

     You can't recall what you were thinking at the time. Maybe the growing smell of burning oil was what made you throw up, or maybe it was the taste of blood that was already making you ill. Or maybe it was just the agony.

     You squeezed your eyes shut and curled your tail tightly into a spiral, making yourself smaller as the green fire roared. You barely felt it when a strong gust swept over you, a gale that extinguished the fire and made everything fizzle into dead silence. It could have been hours until you opened your eyes. But when you did, the smell of smoke still lingered, and your bro's chest was still slick with blood.

     You wonder whether Bro knew you weren't the alpha, whether he knew the other one was running around doing something stupid and ill-advised. Maybe he let you fight Jack because he knew there was a perfectly good Dave still standing who could replace you if you died.

     It was a mistake to let your train of thought get to this point. It's totally gone off the rails outside of Philadelphia, and hundreds are dead. Your fingers twitch in your lap, the only sound in the office the faint flickering of the torches. You shove yourself out of the chair, its back clicking dully against the wood desk.

 

     Jade is bound to know you've been in here by now, but you can't say you care. You just want her to come back. A paranoia seeps into your bones, makes you tremble and flinch at your own shadow that stretches across the hardwood floor.

     Your hand fumbles at your side, yanking your phone out and opening Pesterchum. Jade's chumhandle is set to idle. You sit yourself against the wallpaper and start flooding her with messages.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 8:31 --  
TG: guess who has two thumbs and just wandered through your entire house  
TG: you can bash my head against the wall later  
TG: but like  
TG: seriously where the hell did you go  
TG: not to be a drama queen but i am on the border of Vomitland and Panictopia right now  
TG: stuck in the customs office  
TG: gettin my suitcases browsed through by an underpaid old man whos pocketing all my good shirts to give to his dropout son for christmas  
TG: sorry lame metaphor  
TG: you get what i mean  
TG: jade  
TG: earth to jade this is houston speaking  
TG: ?????????????????  
TG: okay this time i do mean to be a drama queen  
TG: hows this  
TG: IM DYING

 

     With your sprite powers, typing up messages only takes as long as it does to think them. Your onslaught of messages sweeps through the chat box in less than a minute, but you still rest your forehead against the wall in frustration when she doesn't respond right away. You groan for as long as your lungs will let you.

     After another minute passes, you start drifting in circles around the room, chewing your talons and checking your phone every few seconds. You send a few more messages that only consist of question marks. Then you toss the phone onto G. Harley's desk and run your fingers through your hair.

     You wave your arms, as if Jade will be able to notice you this way. “Attention, attention. If I have to spend one more second in here I'm going to lose my god damn mind,” you shout at the ceiling. “It'll just climb out and scurry under a bookcase and I'll never see it again. I repeat, I am about to lose my god da–”

 

     The silhouette of green and yellow that materializes in front of you nearly makes you lose control of the bile in your throat and vomit all over the bear rug. You sweep your hand down in a quick movement, covering your eyes again with your shades. Jade's bare feet touch down, and she looks at you with alarm. Your eyes sting.

 

     “Geez, you made it seem like the house was on fire,” Jade says. She shakes her hair out. “Are you all right?”

     If you had greater impulse control, you would be able to prevent yourself from lurching forward and pulling Jade towards you. But you don't, so you do.

     Jade squeaks slightly and tenses up, her arms frozen at her sides. One of her hunched shoulders brushes your neck. Her hair smells like flour. It feels like hugging an obelisk. Not at all like last week, though you suppose the two incidents aren't very comparable since she wasn't awake for the first one.

 

     You lifted her out of your bed, surprisingly heavy, and hauled her back to her own room. Her arms were folded on her stomach, her fingers grazing your gut. You couldn't will your heart to settle. You nearly ran into the steel paneling trying to open the door, both of your arms occupied. Her cheek rested in the crook of your neck, not stirring at all. Her skin was so _warm_ , like her temperature ran higher from living under the Pacific sun. You tried only haphazardly to cover her with her sheets once you were in her room, your fingers shaking uncontrollably. She rolled onto her side, sighing quietly. Then you simply planted yourself in a chair and clutched your hands to your chest, breathing at an even pace to get the warmth in your face to go away.

 

     It can't be more than a few seconds that she's in your arms before you realize that you're being wildly inappropriate. You practically fling yourself backward. Jade rubs her arms, looking at the floor. Your whole face burns with mortification, and after a moment she laughs nervously and scratches the back of her head.

     “Sorry! Getting used to the whole 'interaction' thing still.” You don't know why _she's_ the one apologizing. Her ears are swiveled back against her head.

     “Same, I guess.” You force a cough.

     “So, you're dying, huh?” Jade asks. She pulls out her phone and waves it a little. “You seem okay to me.”

     You adjust your sunglasses. “Uh, yeah. As a matter of fact I was.”

     “And you're not anymore?”

     Well, _no_ , but it's for a different reason that you don't want her to know.

     You give her a thumbs up. “Nope. All good.”

     Jade places her hands on her hips and cocks her head. “How did you like the house? Was I overreacting?”

 

     You consider a few different answers, some sarcastic, some genuine. After a couple seconds you shrug and make a wishy-washy motion with your hand.

     “I wouldn't give it a ten on TripAdvisor, but it was all right. Maybe a little claustrophobic.”

 

     Jade covers a laugh with her hand, and you've already forgotten what you were anxious about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i toured jade harley's house and all i got was this lousy flashback
> 
> the photo ds finds is partially based off the Nine of Cups card from the homestuck tarot deck.


	13. Chapter 13

     It's been a while since you've been in here.

 

     In past years you spent hours at a time on the office floor, huge swaths of yellowing and ink-stained papers spread out around you in circles. You would sit with your legs crossed, your face resting on your fists while you squinted and scrunched your nose at papers and letters and photos from as far back as the twenties. Reading cursive started to come easily to you. Later, you would find yourself incorporating the same loops and swirls into your own handwriting, though it never came out as elegant.

     It took _so_ long to form a cohesive timeline of your grandfather's life, and yet you still do not know the whole of it. Years at a time went unrecorded. You lined up personal letters and journal reports and the backs of photographs in chronological lines, and still you would be left with spaces where he all but went off the grid. You suppose your entire life qualifies as one of those pockets of dead air. Anyone who might have been looking for him in those last years must be a worse detective than you.

     And yet the planes still arrived like clockwork. None of them ever touched down, just dropped their crates of mail or rations and kept flying. When you were nine, you crouched below your window and aimed your rifle at a passing plane, its row of windows clear in the small circle of your scope. You tried to get a look at the pilot, but the glass was too dark. It continued roaring across the ocean so quickly that it wasn't long before you lost focus.

     If your grandpa ever intended to leave the island, if he ever promised anyone he would return one day, wouldn't _one_ of those planes land to check on you? To make sure the absence of outgoing messages was no mistake? Was anyone he knew even aware you existed?

     Every six months a plane roared ahead. Sometimes you would sit in plain sight on one of the hills to see whether they'd notice you. Whether they'd let you know they saw you. But they never did.

 

     You guess it shouldn't be surprising that Davesprite found a way to sneak in here. You would have _liked_ to show him your grandfather's office on your own terms, but you probably would have never done it at all if he hadn't taken it into his own hands. It's your own fault, really. You lost track of time in the kitchen, and by the time Nanna sent you packing from your excessive yawning (“I won't have you falling asleep face-first in this cake, young lady!”), it was already early morning. You're not sure whether to feel irritated or not. Your self-awareness of your feelings is fogged by sleep.

 

     You sit in Grandpa's leather chair, rotating it from side to side with your bare foot resting on the desk ledge. Sitting in this chair always made you feel scholarly. Sometimes if you were particularly stuck trying to crack the riddle of a fenestrated window, you'd bring it down here to see if it would get you thinking harder. It usually didn't.

     Davesprite perches at the end of the desk, his back mostly turned to you. His face hasn't faded from its glowing yellow. He must still be embarrassed about hugging you.

     Physical human contact still comes as a shock to your system. You wouldn't let Dave touch you when you first met. Not that he really offered – he might have lifted an arm, made a half-baked semblance of a welcoming gesture, but when you shrank away and stuck to a friendly wave, he backed off. Even his hands brushing yours while passing off multicolored frogs made you shudder. For all he knew, you thought he had the Plague.

     Your arms and back still feel like static from where Davesprite held you. You're not really _mad_ about it. You just need a warning, you know? The subject has already passed, so you'd feel awkward trying to tell him that it's not a big deal. He probably wouldn't believe you, anyway. You fold your arms tightly across your chest and look at him from past your bangs.

 

     “How much did you go through?”

     Davesprite shrugs his shoulders and clicks his talons on the desk's edge.

     “I don't actually mind,” you prompt. “You don't have to lie.”

     He turns, and the glow in his cheeks ebbs. “A few journals and newspaper clippings. I quit while I was ahead,” he responds. “My bullshit tolerance has gotten pretty low lately, I guess.”

     “I understand.”

     Davesprite looks away, then turns back to you and shifts his position closer.

     “Did you know about this place? Like, is this not freaky to you at all?” He talks with his hands upturned, his fingers grasping for some sort of answer.

     “Of course I knew. How could I not?” You kick off the desk ledge and let the leather chair spin you around in a blur of green and brown. Your toes on the hardwood slow you down and bring you face-to-face again. “I was in here countless times even when he was alive. The smell is still the same as it was. I tried not to disturb anything too badly.”

     “It's a country club smell.”

     You laugh. “I like it. The wood and paper and stuff... it's a safe smell. I associate it with a sense of security.”

     “Yeah.”

     “We were in here a lot. I don't know why he wanted it to be a hidden room if we lived all the way out here, but I guess he had his reasons. He would sit at the desk writing whatever it was he was so focused on, and I would sit on the floor and play with the rug.”

     “You mean the bear.”

     “Yup. His name is Henry.”

     Davesprite cracks a smile. “Henry the bear rug. Did you name him, or did your grandpa?”

     “No, it was me. It seemed like a proper name for a bear,” you say, tucking your hair behind your ear.

     “Good call with that one.”

     You lean back in the chair. “I sort of remember asking my grandpa why Henry was laying down all the time. I guess I didn't get that he was dead. Grandpa said he was lying low waiting for deer to come by, but since we were in the middle of the ocean Henry would be waiting for a while.”

     “Beary nice.”

     “ _God_.”

 

     A gold and ivory clock atop a bureau clicks across the room. Davesprite says nothing more, so you yawn and blink your burning eyes. You zone out staring at a little bat skeleton that sits arranged mid-flight in a glass case, so when Davesprite speaks again it takes a moment before you can bring your face back towards his.

     “Where were you?”

     “Hmm, well. I was hanging out with Nanna since I couldn't sleep.” You close your eyes. “I think we're... _okay_ now. She isn't mad anymore.”

     “She wasn't to begin with,” Davesprite mumbles. His fingers continue to twist at his gut. “Did you just... leave to go to the battleship?”

     When you open your eyes, you see that Davesprite's eyebrows are furrowed in what could be either anger or confusion. With his eyes hidden, it's impossible to tell. “Yes,” you begin slowly. “But I was keeping an eye out. I was watching the planet. I was watching Echidna.”

     Davesprite looks at his lap.

     “I wouldn't have left you behind if I thought you would be in danger.”

     He shrugs. “All right.”

 

     You rest your head in the crook between your neck and shoulder. Davesprite's irritable twitches are audible, the clicking of his fidgeting talons blending in with the ticking of the clock. Finally he sighs loudly and holds his hands up again, and you blink in alarm when you see how fragile his face looks.

     “Am I annoying you?” he asks.

     “I. What?”

     Davesprite rests his forehead in his hands. “God damn it. That came out wrong. I just mean, like. I know we've been hanging out a lot....”

     “Yes?”

     “And I thought, maybe, you wanted me to back off?” His voice cracks, and the flat, monotone way he delivers his questions has disappeared. He seems to regret asking, though. The bright gold in his cheeks is back.

     You crumple your eyebrows. “What would make you think that?”

     “I mean. I guess you leaving last night made that feeling worse,” he says.

     Your heart sinks.

     “But I guess I've just fallen into this habit of assuming that people think I'm. Like. A fuckin'... pest, or whatever. I don't know,” he continues.

     “I don't think you're a pest,” you say softly. “I don't know how to put it in a way that's understandable. But it's not that.”

     “Can you try?” he asks. You stare at him. His mouth is pulled downward, like he's fighting off tears or vomit.

     “Okay,” you start, sweeping your bangs back with one hand. “I... am not used to _prolonged_ interaction with people. It's not something I grew up with, you know? It wears me out.”

     “Oh.”

     “It isn't that I don't like being with you, because I do. I don't want you to think that I'm sick of you or anything. And I _like_ talking to people, but... this isn't in my nature. It isn't.”

     He takes a moment. “I guess I understand,” he says finally. “Practically didn't talk to nobody for a whole fuckin' year if you don't count Rose.” He pauses. “It's weird. Talking out loud and havin' someone there to respond so you're not just rambling to a wall.”

     “Yeah,” you nod. “That's what I mean. It's more extreme though, since I lived with that through childhood.”

     Davesprite rubs his arms, making himself smaller as he hunches forward. “Do you want me to leave?”

     You rub your eyes and pull your legs up to your chest. “No. You would know if I did. I would tell you if I needed a break.”

     “Are you sure?”

     “I'm positive, yes. I don't want you to leave.”

     For some reason or another, he shudders and turns away.

 

     The clock keeps ticking.

 

     “Are you okay?” you ask.

     Davesprite shrugs.

     You look at your hands, freckled skin glowing from the light of the torches behind you. “You seem uncomfortable.”

     “Do I.”

     “Yeah, you do.” You start to stand. He looks at you, and his face has already solidified into perfect neutrality. “I'm sorry. I forget that it isn't as normal in here as I think it is. Do you want to go outside?”

     Davesprite pushes himself up. “I thought you'd never fuckin' ask.”

 

     It's odd how LOFAF maintains its climate despite its removal from the Medium. You've attempted to arrange the planets so that they rotate at their normal velocity around Skaia, a precarious arrangement keeping their ecosystems in check. At early morning, The Land of Frost and Frogs has a chilly tinge to the air that is beginning to give way to its normal humidity. The drone of insects and amphibians is already in full force. In the back of the trees, you think you see a few stray iguanas roaming the underbrush.

     The two of you perch on the stone step that leads up to the front door. Sitting on Davesprite's left, you have to be careful not to lean back and squash his good wing. The air makes you feel a little more awake, and you lean toward your knees to keep warm.

 

     “So,” Davesprite starts. “Your grandpa has been to Prospit.”

     You look up at him, feeling how wide your eyes have gone. He blurted it out without a preamble, like he didn't know how else to broach the topic.

     “Yes,” you respond cautiously. “The frog temple had transportalizers to the dream moons.”

     “I gathered that much,” he says. “From the journals.”

     “Ah, those. Yes, they're informative for anyone who hasn't lived half their life on Prospit.”

     “Yeah. But, um. _Why_?”

     “Why were they there?”

     Davesprite nods.

     You sigh. “All right, well, I should start by noting that this is all secondhand information. Bec never let me enter the temple. The day I entered the game was the first time I had ever been more than a few feet past the entrance.”

     “Huh. Okay.”

     “Frog temples are essentially a universal occurrence on those planets that are destined to experience SBURB one day, along with other phenomena like First Guardians. Which is what Becquerel was.”

     “Right.”

     “As for the glyphs inside, I couldn't tell you what their purpose was. He must have figured it out eventually, but if he did, the journal is lost.”

     “Maybe it's a big fat warning telling everyone to get the hell off Earth before they get obliterated by flaming rock.”

     You snort. “If so, Skaia picked a poor location to send it.”

     “So the whole damn thing came down on a meteor?”

     “Yup. Just like us! You know how the Medium has a Veil, right?”

     “The ring of rocks that keeps us from the Octopus Nightmare Brigade.”

     “Ha! Well, frog temples originate from the Veil. So that's why it was on a meteor, and that's why it had transportalizers. A lot of carapacians build laboratories out there, and they need a way to get home.”

     “Like the meteor everyone else is on.” Davesprite's tone is flat.

     Your smile fades. “Exactly.”

  
    He stretches his arms above his head, leaning against the cool stone of the front door. “Must have been weird having a huge frog-headed tower near your house.”

     “Sort of! The house was big enough as it was, though. Eventually I stopped wanting so badly to see inside the temple. I already had enough to tend to, you know?”

     “I bet spring cleaning was more like, spring through fall cleaning.”

     “Not really.” You push your legs out in front of you, your heels digging into the cool dirt. “I curtained a bunch of rooms off so they wouldn't mildew, so that took care of a lot of issues. Bec didn't really like for me to touch the arrangements Grandpa had left the house in, either, so I didn't get to do much in terms of dusting. I guess it's lucky I'm not allergic to dust.”

     “You'd like, die.”

     “Definitely. It was like living in a museum. No touching the displays.” You sigh. “At least, I _think_ that's the right analogy. I've never been to a museum.”

     “No, you got it. Analogy secured.”

 

     A tree nearby comes to life with the flock of hummingbirds that burst from its branches. They fly off in opposite directions, and you watch the sky become freckled with lavender. The jostled branches shed a coat of scarlet flower petals, drifting to the ground lazily.

 

     “Was it weird having all that stuff in the house?” Davesprite asks.

     “Weird?” You lean back, then jolt forward when your hair brushes his feathers. He shivers and looks down. “'Weird' is something out of the ordinary. How could I think it was weird if I grew up with it? It was my normal.”

     “Maybe I didn't ask it right.” Davesprite faces you, but avoids eye contact by staring at your knees. “I mean, didn't it make you sad to see all that shit left behind?”

     “Oh.” You exhale through your nose. “I–”

     “You don't have to answer,” Davesprite interrupts. His feathers look puffed up. “I was just asking because. I don't know. I got a really strange vibe from it all. It was very....”

     You wait.

     “ _Lonely_ ,” he finishes.

     “No, yeah, I understood the question,” you say. “Just give me a second.”

     “All right.”

 

 

     You are four years old, traversing the hills with legs that get more confident each day. Becquerel still tries to get you to ride on his back everywhere like a great white horse, and so as you walk cautiously through the grass he sticks to your side and snuffles your cheek with his cold nose.

     Somewhere behind you is a cold metal pistol, its silver engravings glinting in the weeds. You got tired of playing with it once it went off suddenly, a loud crack of gunpowder that made you lurch back. You tried to get the ringing in your ears to go away by forming earmuffs with your hands. The barrel smelled bad, but you couldn't find the bullet that came out. Becquerel growled and circled you a few times, licking your face as though you were hurt. For a moment you had forgotten he was there.

     No longer fun, you left the pistol behind. You got a strife specibus recently for your birthday, but you haven't really gotten the hang of it yet. Eventually your grandpa might find the pistol in the grass and scold you for abandoning it, but you barely recognize the risk.

     He is exactly where he was when you wandered off, the tea table he set up never quite disappearing from your view at the bottom of the hill. You wave at him once your little legs get you up the slope, but you stumble a bit on the hem of your skirt and land in a kneeling position. Your grandpa does not say anything, does not stand or extend a hand to pull you up. He looks away, his shoulders slumped and his glasses a bit askew on his face. He looks tired.

     You do not remember what it was you said to him, nor your first reaction to the blood turning brown on his lapel. From across the table, a pair of buttons stared.

     That awful doll. It was originally meant for you, but he appropriated it after a couple of years. You think that the first few years of Pacific isolation started to _get_ to your grandfather. A toddler doesn't really qualify as proper human company – they can't carry on much of a conversation. You can't remember ever regarding the doll as your own.

     For years you will wake up in a sweat, the edges of her blue hair still in your periphery where you could swear she was waiting in the corner of your room. Her blank face will still visit you even once you realize that, despite all the oddities in your life, dolls cannot kill humans. But you will never bring yourself to drag her from her spot in the grand foyer and stuff her yarn and cloth body into the fireplace like you so desperately want to. He wouldn't appreciate that.

     You're barely able to drag your grandfather towards the house for twenty yards before Becquerel realizes what you're trying to do and zaps you both into the grand foyer. You sit on the Persian carpet with your face in your hands for hours. You cry and cry and cry. Bec wraps himself around you. For the first night, you sleep in his fur.

 

 

     “No,” you say. “The house _was_ lonely, but his possessions didn't make it that way. It would be even worse if I had nothing left to remember him by.”

     Davesprite doesn't say anything.

     “Does that answer your question?”

     He tilts his head from side to side. “Yeah. Sorry for asking. Like... _man_ , there's so much _crap_ in there.”

     You laugh, slapping your upper leg with one hand. “I told you! He had a lot of interests.”

     “More like a lot of complexes. Was about to put A&E on the line. 'Hello? I've got an episode of _Hoarders_ the likes of which your network doesn't even have the comprehension for. Put all planned episodes on hold.'”

     “Oh, please. Knights and mummies are ten times more awesome than a bunch of deformed puppets,” you retort, elbowing him in the side.

     “God, okay, you got me there,” he laughs. “Did your grandpa ever swipe anything from Derse? Because if so, I am obligated as a moon representative to file a police report.”

     “He _did_ , and I'd like to see you try to convict!”

     Davesprite aims a pointed talon at you. “Listen, those Dersite legislators don't play. Bing, bang, boom – a few bribes later and Gramps is in the slammer for breaking and entering and the dismantling of government property.”

     “The slammer? Isn't that a little campy?”

     “You call it the slammer when you're extra angry at crimes.”

     “Well, if the good people of Derse want to take back their precious goods, this ship wouldn't have a destination anymore.”

     “What's that supposed to mean.”

     “I mean the fenestrated window we're hurdling towards used to belong to Derse! Grandpa hauled the whole thing off one day. It's in one of the later journals.”

     “Oh. Well fuck. Thanks for jacking our shit then, G. Harley.”

     “Pretty much.”

 

     Davesprite seems less tense now, his shoulders lowered and his smile relaxed. You tilt your head to look at him sideways.

     “Did you like Derse?”

     He lifts his hand and makes an indecisive gesture. “As much as you _can_ be jazzed about being a fart away from a writhing mass of horrible, terrible spaghetti monsters.”

     “So, not very much?”

     He scrunches his mouth up. “It was all right. Kind of cold, but anything under seventy degrees is cold for me.”

     “Same here.”

     “Yeah. I guess it was kind of nice? The city was really quiet. Purple ain't my favorite color either, but it was a lot better than, like, flaming lava red, y'know? As long as you didn't look at the gods, if you didn't listen to their godawful voices, it was pretty peaceful.”

     “I only ask because I've heard bad things.”

     Davesprite snorts. “Jesus, that dumb rivalry. No offense, but I'd also be inclined to hate on a moon that thought every last god damn thing should be bright gold.”

     “Hey!”

     “Just tellin' it like it is, Jade.”

     You pull your hair back and sweep it over your left shoulder. “Prospit had a lot of fun things to do, though. The people tend to be really friendly to the dreamers.”

     “I wouldn't know,” Davesprite says. “I didn't really go below the tower. I know Rose did once she started goin' off the rails. She would just go down there and blab and blab and try to get the chess people to give her game intel. I think it made her feel like she was doing something important.” His mouth is set in a stony frown. “She said that everyone kind of brushed her off. Like maybe they _knew_? Maybe they knew we were doomed. Maybe they were mad at us.”

     Your fingers twist in your lap. “Going off the rails?”

     Davesprite settles back and looks up at the sky, his head resting on the door. The feathers of his wing brush your back, but he doesn't move them away. “That's the basic way of putting it. Rose was. Like. I don't know. After a few weeks passed, she got kind of weird. Like the kind of weird that those guys on city blocks wearing 'The End Is Near' sandwich boards are, but more subdued, 'cause y'know, it's fuckin' Rose.”

     “Hmm.”

     “Obviously her fuckin' mom left like, an apocalypse bunker's supply of booze. She disappeared too, on top of my bro. Just straight up fled the coop. Rose was never able to find her.”

     Your eyebrows knit together. “That's strange.”

     “Fuckin' tell me about it. So y'know. Drinking laws don't apply in the Medium.”

     A heavy lump forms in your throat.

     “I _told_ her to be cool about it. Neither of us needed her to be a drag on the team. Fuckin'... passing out on the floor when she could be talking to Cetus or exploring the planet. Had half a mind to take the gate to her house and smash every last bottle in that room.”

     “Did you ever to go LOLAR?”

     “No.” He swallows. “I know it seems kind of dumb. Like, why would I stay on my planet if it was so miserable. But she didn't want me there. I don't know why.”

     “But you talked on Derse, right?”

     “Yeah. I was the first to wake up. Or I mean... I guess I was always awake and I just didn't know it? Like I was always sort of sleepwalkin' like a huge dope and one day I was just. Awake. I never figured out what the deal was with that.”

     You tap your chin. “That sounds like a pattern breaker. I've never heard of that happening.”

     “I guess I'm just a freak,” he says. “So there was only one other tower. Pretty easy to put two and two together. I remember throwing one of her yarn balls at her head to wake her up. That was pretty funny. She felt _so_ bad for calling bullshit on your whole dream-talking psychobabble.”

     You smile. “Oh, trust me. I could tell she was humoring me.”

     “Yeah, it was trippy for both of us.” Davesprite wrings his hands. “Whenever I wasn't roamin' around like the goddamn Lone Ranger slashin' the shit out of underlings, and _she_ wasn't drinking half her weight, we would crash on Derse and try to figure out what the next plan was.” He scratches behind his ear. “Y'know, so it wasn't all for nothing.”

     “It always seemed that you knew more about the game than everyone else,” you offer. You hope this will make him feel a bit better, but he only slightly smiles.

     “I'd fuckin' hope so. Would be embarrassing any other way.”

 

     The air has warmed. You adjust your glasses, sliding down your nose from the mugginess that makes your skin stick. Davesprite stretches his wing to feel the breeze that comes through, and you start when his feathers graze your exposed lower back.

 

     “I'm sorry you had to go through that,” you say finally. You nearly mumble it so he won't hear you, but he exhales anyway and throws his hands up in a kind of resignation.

     “It is what it is,” he says.

     Your fingernails dig into your forearms. “I'm sorry I'm putting you through it again.”

     “Come on, Jade, we went over this.”

     “I can't help it.”

     Davesprite licks his lips and leans forward, resting his elbows on his tail. “What's three more years of what you've been used to. I mean, at least only one of you died this time.”

 

     You shrink away, and when he looks at you his face twists up. “Shit, I'm sorry,” he breathes. You must look like a kicked puppy to draw that tone of voice out of him. “That was mean. You know what I meant.”

     “I guess so.”

     “I don't wanna minimize anyone's feelings. I'm sorry. It's just my nature as a Time player.”

     “What do you mean?”

     He sighs heavily. “Don't get me wrong, Jade. I'm upset, okay? For perfectly normal reasons. Like shit, who wouldn't be.”

     “Right.”

     “But Time players are like, wired for this. Once you ease into your role, nihilism just digs itself into you. You see yourself die so many times, and you just have to be _okay_ with it. Even if you're not. I don't know. It was probably worse for Dave, since he had more time to fuck up than I did.”

     You fidget. “It isn't a competition, Davesprite. Suffering is suffering.”

     “All I'm trying to say is that Time players have to embrace failure. And I guess I could accept the current shitstorm of a situation if it was just me who had to deal. But you're here too, and I. God.”

     “Davesprite?”

     The corner of his mouth tics. “I wanted someone to understand, when I reversed. That's why I arranged things with Rose the way I did. Like I wouldn't go crazy if it wasn't just me with those memories.” He draws his wing in suddenly, folding it tightly across his back. You shiver from the draft. “It fucking sucks to see what it does to other people, though. This kind of withering-away bullshit should only happen to Time players. No one else deserves it.”

     “Does _anyone_ deserve this?”

     He shakes his head. “Who knows. All I know for sure is that I'm the most equipped for this stupid-ass brand of trauma.”

     You pull your legs closer to your chest. “I'm not sure you believe that. You can't force yourself to be okay with this just because the game assigned you to a certain title. It's okay to disagree with the role you've been given.”

     Davesprite's eyebrow twitches.

     “That's just my opinion, though,” you add. Your cheeks warm when he doesn't respond right away.

     “Either way,” he sighs. “If this has to happen to me again, then fuck it. I just wish you didn't have to be involved.”

     You're not sure how to feel.

 

     He has nothing else to say, so you mull over what he said about embracing failure. It certainly sounds like a nihilist Time player sort of thing to say. But maybe he has a point. Doomed timelines have no consequences. The overwhelming chill that this train of thought always brings you comes back, prickling your arms with goosebumps.

     At the end of the day, none of this matters. If the battleship manages to take you through the glass, nothing you could possibly do would allow you to win the game. The victory platform would remain barren, and you would wait and wait but no door would ever appear. Is it even any use to fight at all? To finish the game?

     If you didn't want to, you wouldn't even have to tell anyone anything. You could abandon ship and flee to the Furthest Ring, disappearing behind miles of meteor before anyone ever thought to look for you. The timeline would give its last breath, your physical form would fizzle out in the vast abyss of the Elder Gods, and that would be the end of it. Like dying in your sleep. You could pull this plan off if you really wanted to. The alternative – telling them that you let John die, having them blame and hate you just before the timeline sputtered out – is unbearable. Your breath catches in your throat.

 

     “Jade?”

     You jump. Davesprite is staring at you, reading whatever horrified look you must have on your face.

     You fold into yourself, hugging your sides and leaning into your legs. “They're going to hate me.”

     “Who.”

     “Rose and Dave. They'll never understand.”

     Davesprite sighs and leans against you, his arms tight across his chest. His arm feels odd against yours, like something electric and inorganic is pulsing under the skin. “Who gives a shit what they'll think. They don't know anything.”

     You don't respond.

     “I'm not in any place to be giving doomed timeline advice like this is some sort of arbitrary life crisis,” he continues. “You can ignore me if you want. But it gets better as the months go on. You kind of stop caring.”

     “I have trouble believing that.”

     He shrugs, jostling you in the process. “Like I said, it's different for Time players. Maybe I'm just fucked up and numbed to tragedy, I don't know.”

     “Hm.”

     “Either way, I already know how hard it sucks. And if I can help it, I won't let you get as low as I did. 'Cause that's some serious rock bottom shit, and it ain't cute.”

 

     You tuck your feet into the long cuffs of your pants. “I appreciate the sentiment. We'll just have to wait and see.”

     “Yeah,” he says softly.

     “Anyway,” you yawn. “I've been awake for twenty-four hours. If I don't go upstairs _right_ now I'm gonna pass out.”

     “Pff, yeah. Wouldn't want you falling asleep on me again.”

     “Whatever, Davesprite! That was _one_ time,” you say, jabbing him in the side. He laughs as you stand up, brushing the debris of LOFAF off of you.

     “Can I at least try out those sick speakers while you're knocked out. I'm wide awake, man. Got me those eight hours. Pumped for the day and shit.”

     “Okay, okay, but keep it down. If I have any weird dreams about Snoop Dogg, it'll be on you.”

     “Wow, shit, infiltrating minds with the astral power of Snoop. Now I wanna do that.”

 

     The cool air of the grand foyer rushes out as you open the door, and the smell of the Persian rug sends a twinge into your spine. “You can do your psychological experiments some other time, but I'd actually like to sleep _well_ right now.”

     “All right, but no one's safe from the Snoop for long,” Davesprite says as he floats ahead. He drifts nearly to the top of the ceiling, the slight glow of his orange tail disappearing as he sails into the next room and up the stairwell. He doesn't even wait for you to catch up.

 

     You can feel how wide you're smiling. He's getting used to the house. You underestimated him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> most of this fic takes place in 2009, but the time skipping begins now. if you werent paying attention to the timestamps, now is a good time to start. itll keep ya grounded. next chapter will take place a little under a month after this one.


	14. Chapter 14

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 18 May, 2009

 

     It's like falling through your bed, like the mattress folds away under your back and your sweat-drenched sheets unravel and dissipate somewhere far above you and a vast yawning abyss opens and lifts you up and you're... still in bed. You're still asleep, sort of, but your skin is prickling from the chill and your movements are delayed, like your body is getting used to your secondary vessel.  
  
    The first time you woke up on Derse was in the early morning of April 14th. You spent all night waiting at the computer for one them to answer you, and as your head was drooping and your eyelids were burning you rested your forehead on the keyboard and you... well, it's hard to explain.  
  
      In the next few weeks you would find yourself unable to control your visits to the the moon beyond the Veil. You would pace your room in your apartment and “wake up” suddenly in your dream room while your waking body stood wavering in whatever position you were in. Kind of like switching between tabs on the Internet. You could shake your head and blink out of it, but you came to appreciate the comfortable climate of Derse. Everything falls to a hush, your sunglasses and the sheer force of your obstinacy shielding you from the full weight of the eldritch whispers just out of earshot. A soft clicking remains, though – the clacking of great beaks, the churning of masses of tentacles, the squelching of thousand-eyed beasts blinking without seeing. You start turning the music up so high that your speakers are tinged with static.  
  
    Rose has opened her ears fully to the Elder Gods. It's right up her alley of grimoire ghoulery. She got the hang of dreaming quicker than you. She needs a lot of naps to stave off her hangovers, and receives the added bonus of learning more about the moon than you have the energy for. The Dersites are ignoring her now. You might wake up in your bed and wander to the window, and from across the chasm you will see her sitting on her windowsill, her head swaying slightly and staring up at the Gods. What else is she supposed to do? Your heart will hurt from how sad the sight of her is. A child on a hillside gazing up at the Milky Way, contemplating the concept of extraterrestrial life. You never ask her what she hears.

 

     Last night you fell asleep with every cell in you screaming from hiking a several mile radius of LOHAC. Your bro is still nowhere to be found. The sly bastard. You bring water wherever you go, but it boils quickly and nearly evaporates and you're left even thirstier than you were before. You collapsed in your sheets thinking you might die of dehydration, and it wasn't long after you closed your eyes that the bed fell away and your coat of sweat dissipated and you were clean and cool and purple.  
  
    Waking, or falling asleep, or falling un-awake peels away your sleepiness like snakeskin, sharpening your senses and clearing your mind. You become quick to act, even impulsive. When you open your eyes on Derse, your thoughts first hone in on the phosphorescent glow cast across your bed from the shitty jpegy subconscious scribbling on your wall. You could hear a pin drop. The shuffling of your sheets as you get out of bed is deafening.  
  
    Rose cannot be seen from your window. You fetch the Derse equivalent of your phone from beside your computer mouse and open Pesterchum. Your fingers shake over the keyboard as your mind adjusts to your dream body. You misspell “awake” twice.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 00:59 --  
TG: im awake again  
TG: or uh  
TG: asleep  
TG: are you coherent y/n  
TT: “Y.”  
TT: Fortunately you caught me at a time of only minimal cerebral palpitations.  
TT: Proceed.  
TG: cool omw

    

      You put one hand atop the windowsill frame, step up with one foot, and will yourself not to fall. Derse sprawls under your orange shoes. Across the horizon, you can see the four prototyping towers poking the abyss, their three glowing orbs glowing white. You float slowly, heartbeat restless.  
  
    One Mississippi, two Mississippi. The sky never loses its novelty. You don't think you'll ever see anything quite so black.  
  
    What should be a twenty-second trip takes a few minutes. Your hand trembles when it reaches the violet marble of Rose's dream room. You set your feet on her window frame.

 

    “How was your hike?” Rose asks.

     She sits at the end of her bed, her back to you. The piles of clothes and yarn on her floor haven't budged. You remember this detail being the first thing to catch your attention when you woke her dreaming self. You would have expected it to be cleaner, everything in its place. Rose calls it "organized chaos."  
  
    “Sucked. Bear Grylls would take my lunch money and give me a swirly."  
  
    Rose snorts, shoulders shaking. “I sincerely hope I can rely on you not to drink your own piss for sustenance.”  
  
    “Yeah, well, your expectations of me shouldn't be too high to begin with. But it ain't that bad yet.”  
  
    You jump down from the sill, and your soles make a dull thud on the carpet. She turns slightly, her elbows resting on her knees as she rubs her temples. You've stopped asking her if she feels okay.  
  
    “You know, it's rude to wear shoes indoors when one is a guest in another's home.”  
  
    “Good night to you, too.”

     You shove your hands in your pockets and make your way to Rose's desk chair, plopping down and causing it to swivel in a half-circle. Rose keeps her forehead in her hands, like she expects to reach into the skin and extract the ache.  
  
    “Have you found him yet?”  
  
    “What do you think.”  
  
    “I thought as much.” Rose takes a deep inhale and lifts her face, then releases a slow exhale. She pulls one leg up, holding it with both hands.  
  
    “What about your mom.”  
  
    “Neither hide nor hair.” Her fingers dig into her leggings. “Dave?”  
  
    “Yeah.”  
  
    “What could have happened to them?”  
  
    You blink. Rose's eyes are lined with dark purple, her look somehow gaunter than the last time you spoke. She stopped wearing eye makeup a couple weeks in, and her bare eyelids make her seem more tired. Her outline is tinged with the neon green from the nonsense she's written on the walls. You don't feel like making fun of the meows today.  
  
    “If we knew, we wouldn't be looking for 'em.”  
  
    She looks down and nods. “A silly question. It _is_ hard not to wonder, though.”  
  
    “I know.”

     Rose lets go of her leg and fiddles with the long front of her tunic. “You may be pleased to know that I've been cooking up a plan in here while you were out earning Boy Scout badges."  
  
    “Are you finally gonna prove your worth to Cetus by showing her how well you can function under alcohol poisoning.”  
  
    “Dave.”  
  
    You stop spinning in the desk chair.  
  
    “It involves a little field trip.” Rose steeples her fingers. “To Prospit.”  
  
    You only sneer in response, and she sighs in exasperation.  
  
    “I have it on good word from the townspeople that the heart of each moon contains crypts not unlike the Quest Beds on our own planets.”  
  
    “So.”  
  
    “ _So_ , if a body were to be placed onto one of those crypts, it would grant them the ability to ascend. Cheating the system, if you will.”  
  
    You close your eyes.  
  
    “They're still in their rooms, Dave. The tabloids haven't reported any funerals.”  
  
    You exhale and rub your temple. “And how do you think this is going to work. They don't trust us over there.”  
  
    “I'm still mulling it over. The Prospitians have no reason to doubt our intentions. We could meet with the Queen if we had to.”  
  
    “Rose.”  
  
    “The next shuttle leaves in two hours.”  
  
    “Rose.”  
  
    “What?”  
  
    “It's too late. You know that.”  
  
    Rose hangs her head.  
  
    “We missed the window, okay? The deadline is up. The bodies in those rooms are never gonna wake up.”  
  
    Her body stiffens, and you can barely tell she's even breathing.  
  
    “I mean, I guess it's great you're thinking outside the box, but....”  
  
    Rose looks at you past her bangs. Her hair looks unbrushed, a full two inches of brown roots showing.

   "You can't mean to tell me you don't want to see them?"

    What a stupid question. Of course you do. You can see them now, catatonic in their golden towers. How can you entertain the thought of going over there? How can you see them, much less contemplate resurrecting them if you're only going to leave? You don't want their faces in your mind when you reverse. Rose stares at the scowl on your face.

    “They're really dead, aren't they?”  
  
    Her voice is so delicate. You swallow the lump in your throat.  
  
    Before you can answer, she shakes her head and looks at her lap. “No. No.”

    You cannot tell what she's referring to.

 

     Rose's hands twist in her lap while you stare at the wall. Her psychobabble glows bright, M's and E's and O's and W's written bold and lopsided. Nothing like her handwriting. You crinkle your nose.  
  
    “Rose.”  
  
    She jumps and looks at you, eyes dull. “What is it?”  
  
    “Do you smell something?”  
  
    Rose's eyebrows furrow. “Do I _smell_ something? Care to specify?”  
  
    “I don't know, it just smells like... salt, or something.”  
  
    “Like saltwater?”  
  
    You nod. “Yeah, that's it.”  
  
    Her mouth hangs slightly open in an incredulous frown, and you can tell that she's passing psychoanalytical judgment on you already. “Dave, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

 

 

     Jade's room is dark. Your eyes burn when you wake up, your cheek buried in thin yellow sheets. Her beach-and-soil scent lingers in your nose.

     Rose used to tell you that having vivid dreams was a sign of not sleeping well. You've got to stop eating chips before bed.

 

     You can't enter dream bubbles. At least, you assume you can't. You haven't managed to pull it off yet. Actually, you don't even need to sleep. Falling asleep now is like holding the power button down. _Slide to power off_. Maybe your lack of a real body bars your entry, no proper hologram to project into the bubbles. Wouldn't that be ironic? You're practically a ghost anyway.  
  
      The bubbles seem better in theory than in practice, you know. The idea of seeing Rose or John – either version of him, you're not picky – fills your chest with ache. You would especially like to apologize to John for defiling his movie poster, as funny as your graffiti was. You'd like to remind Rose to take care of herself, to give her an empty threat about flapping your wings in her face if she so much as thinks about drinking. But if you ever saw them, you know you'd never know what to say. You would stand from a distance, simply watching, and before they could even turn their head toward you, the force of your panic would jolt you awake.  
  
     You haven't asked Jade if she's entered any bubbles, and you're not sure she would tell you if she did. You think you'd like for her to keep it to herself. You're still prone to envy, after all.

 

     You blink your stinging eyes and inhale the metal scent of the battleship hull. Your stuff is starting to accumulate in here. The few possessions she's zapped in here, anyway. Feathers are scattered in places on the floor, a modest piece of DJing equipment propping up the neck of a bright blue bass guitar that Jade alchemized last week. She was able to find a loose and tattered tank top she said was in the back of your closet, since you were unwilling to look for yourself, and it's the only thing you can fit over your one wing. It lies on the floor now like a rag. You'll start wearing it more once your stitches get taken out.

     It's with minimal surprise as you lie with your arms curled into your chest that you realize you haven't been in your own room in almost a month. Your sprite pendant is still in there, probably, if a greedy carapacian hasn't swiped it to barter with yet.

    Exhaling through your nostrils, you look up from the end of the bed. Jade is curled into a backward C shape, legs pulled up close, arms extending in front of her. Her face is pulled into an anxious frown. In the dark green light, you can see that her hands are shaking. You reach out tentatively, your hand hovering for several seconds as you fight with yourself. To comfort or not to comfort.

     Accidental brushings of the hand, of the arm, the grazing of your fingers against her shoulder in the middle of a ramble – all of these have ceased to cause embarrassment in you. You like the physical contact, the reminder that a warm and living human is there beside you. So it's not your own insecurities that make you nervous when these fleeting moments of touch occur, but only that you still expect the worst reaction. You still expect Jade to lurch away, to lift her hand and fling you miles away in a flash of green lightning. You're still shocked she didn't skip you like a stone across some great lake of LOFAF the moment that you hugged her. Stupid, stupid. You can't believe you did that. You can still remember how tense she was, her muscles like cinder block, only her hair malleable under your desperate hands. You are not sure whether your memory inserted the image of her red face after the fact, or whether she was always blushing. Maybe it was just the light of the torches. You suppose it doesn't matter either way.

     Jade sighs in her sleep. Slowly, you hold your arm out and take her hand in yours.

     Her face softens, relaxing into something resembling solace. Your heart hurts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> are you ready for this to Get Gay because i sure am
> 
> daves dream room in canon doesnt have a bed bcus of game equipment but i do whatever i want because canon is fake and rules dont apply (mashes hands all over keyboard and bleats like goat)


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its about to go down

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date ?? June, 2009

 

     Somehow, “your room” becomes “the room.”  
  
    Anyone else would have trouble pinpointing who occupied this space first. Davesprite's mark is indelibly left. You're not even sure how he managed to leave such a presence, considering he still won't go to his apartment to collect his things, but a large part is due to the coating of orange feathers that you've quit trying to clean up. Most of them stem from the steady process of removing his stitches. Each day you take a little more out as the skin is ready, and his computer-coded wing molts as it reconfigures its original shape.  
  
     Maybe you leave the feathers where they are because it's like a minor victory. You've helped one of your friends at the very least, and that is almost enough. And anyway, you appreciate the reminder that you are not alone.

     DJ equipment tangles itself with your own instruments in coils of black wire, though you're not sure why he asked for any of it. You've seen him take _maybe_ one stab at remixing anything so far. He sits with it on his lap, his taloned hands hovering above dials and buttons and switches, and he simply stares. Like he forgot how to do it. He'll give a frustrated huff, remove his headphones, put them back on, click his claws irritably on the vinyl, then give up entirely and set it back on the floor. You watch from the end of the bed, sad in a secondhand way.

     Not much better could be said for yourself. When you alchemized a new guitar out of captchalogued ghost drawings and your eclectic bass' old instruction manual, Davesprite seemed kind of excited. He folded his arms and rested his chin on them from his spot on the floor, and you tuned it for a few minutes, but when it came time to play your fingers were leaden. You stared at the neck, fingertips twitching, and something in you felt misplaced.

     Other markers remain. Loose Polaroids, fuzzed with motion blur as Davesprite tries to snap a sly photo of you with his clunky camera. You always turn away just quickly enough, your hand flung up to shield your face. Photos of stout and colorful consorts, maybe a shot of you from the back, kneeling down to scoop up a bright blue iguana. You've started to think of them like pets. During those rare hours where the bedroom door is cracked, one of them may waddle in on their little webbed feet and you'll hold them like cats. Davesprite tries to mimic you, but they don't like it when he pets them – his hands are too rough. They do like when he raps to them, though. Like entertaining small children, with the benefit of edging him back into an old interest. His voice is still gruff with its avian rasp, but gentle and low like someone who is deeply tired and only wishes to get to sleep. Davesprite speaks slowly and methodically, his speech only hard to follow when he gets neck-deep in a convoluted ramble of metaphor. You strain to listen to each word so you can remember how to pronounce them correctly later on.

     Squiddles coated in fabric pills poke out from under the bed and the closet, stumpy tentacles waving. Sometimes you'll be in the middle of falling asleep and jolt up with a start when two of them gravitate together and lock their magnetized appendages together. And of course, there are always the plants. You've brought in one after another from your atrium, stringing them from the ceiling and wherever else they'll fit. You water them when you remember, and it makes you feel warm to see the plump green return to their leaves. You might stand barefoot on the mattress, the long neck of your watering can poking into a fern, and Davesprite will murmur over the whisper of the water that you may as well just return to the atrium, rebuild it wholly. Usually you don't say anything, but if it's a good day you might leave him with a simple “We'll see.”

     You know that most of these little possessions could be assigned as being either yours or Davesprite's. A or B. But you've almost stopped labeling them as such. Your things seem like artifacts of another life, belonging to a girl who is already irretrievably lost. In the night you might blink awake and see a poster from across the room, suddenly unable to identify where it came from or why you even liked it in the first place. You come to the conclusion that someone could burn every last thing you own in this room and you would scarcely care. Whether this is some side effect of trauma or the mark of the doomed, you cannot tell. You're sure Rose would be able to tell you.

 

     The bed could be likened to a nest, if you felt like being literal. The pale yellow sheets tend to find themselves wrapped in a wrinkled circle, and an indent has formed in the middle from where you've curled up almost every night – save for the ones where you go home, but your bed in the atrium has a similar predicament. You didn't always used to have such a messy bed. You found a small happiness in having it neatly tucked and folded, fabric crisp and clean in a way most of the house wasn't. You guess it's just because you have someone else sleeping in it, too.

     Davesprite has made a slow trajectory across your bed, a line graph making a steady upward climb. In the first couple weeks, he slept at the very end of your bed like a house pet, sitting casually at the footboard in one moment and falling asleep like that in the next. You would wake up with him curled into a tight ball, sometimes shivering under his wing. You felt bad, but thought that if he wanted to bring attention to it, he would. So you left him to his own devices, to scope out for himself the boundaries of what you would allow. It was a surprise, then, when one morning you stirred to see him still asleep, but with his forearm grazing the skin of your ankle that poked out from the sheets. The prolonged sense of touch was close to surrealism to your skin so accustomed to separateness, and as you blinked at the spot where your bodies met, you felt that something in you was about to change. But then he sighed in his sleep and rolled over, tossing his arm over his side, and the contact was lost. The name you decide upon later for what you felt in that moment is “disappointment.”

     He becomes bolder, whether he knows it or not. After all, he moves a lot in his sleep. You might be in the midst of some ill-conjured nightmare, the smell of burning oil and smoking rubble in your nose, and in the throes of it all you might feel some softening in the back of your mind and wake with his fingers loosely entwined in yours. As the weeks pass on he promotes himself from Lapdog Extraordinaire, drifting closer like flotsam, your bodies forming a pair of parentheses. His arms brush yours, his TV-static tail wisping in twitches and flicks at your feet. It helps you sleep, as you both often do in the long unoccupied hours – a repetitious and constant reassurance. He tosses and turns, and when you're within reach he might grasp for your arm or your waist to cling to like a tree trunk in a hurricane.

     One night you woke up alarmed, heart thumping from his intense grip on you. Davesprite's torso was flush along your spine, quickened breath hot on your neck. His arm wound tightly around your chest and under the loose fabric of your shirt that gathered just below your ribs, his coarse hand cupping the bottom of your breast and his talon-tips poking the skin. For a few minutes you could only lay there in shock, deeply embarrassed. You edged his hand off of you by degrees, but even as his breath evened out in his sleep and his grasp slackened, his tail remained in a cat's cradle around your legs.

     In the morning, the memory was already half-buried under the heavy wool of frequent sleep that now makes you more forgetful. It didn't bubble to the surface – the warm hand on your chest and the static radiation binding your ankles together – until Davesprite's tail tip flicked in the middle of a sentence and skimmed your calf. Instinctively you pulled your leg towards you, and past his sunglasses you thought he looked surprised.

     He wouldn't even be able to look at you if he had woken up at any point and seen what he was doing. You're certain he doesn't remember a thing. You almost wish he does.

 

     Now, you lie awake in the early hours in the morning and watch the streaks of gold and white flicker outside the window. Your heart beats quickly, though you aren't sure why. Davesprite's wing flexes in his sleep and stretches over your hip. You thumb one of the long primaries absentmindedly.

     It could be worse, you think.


	16. Chapter 16

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 02 July, 2009

 

     Yet another one of your jokes got slam dunked in the trash earlier this afternoon on account of Jade not knowing what the fuck anything in American society is.

 

     You sat back in the chair by the porthole window, clacking its legs against the steel floor while Jade yawned under the bedsheets, a couple of iguanas crawling all over her legs and batting at each other from past the arches of her knees. One of them extended their tiny reptilian claws, snagging the sheets and, consequently, Jade's leg.

     “Damn it!” Jade kicked out, the sheets wisping as both consorts fell over onto their backs. “Geez, please be more careful,” she added, her voice lowered like she didn't want them to think she was mad.

     “You okay.”

     “Yeah. Man, it's like these guys have needles for fingers.” Jade sat up in bed and crossed her legs. The offending iguana squeezed its eyes shut and popped a green phlegm bubble.

 

     This happens a lot. Consorts tend to flock to their planet's players, blowing spit bubbles in their faces and running in circles around their ankles. The nakodiles don't really bother you, though. Some of them have met alpha Dave already – a few of them snapped at your tail the other day and asked you with malicious cackles if you wanted to help them make a nice chicken soup, to which you cawed and fluffed your wing out to shoo them away – but most of them do not register you as their Knight.

     Jade, however, has a good relationship with her consorts. They're all very quiet, melting into the background until they can unassumingly materialize in her lap or on her shoulder. Jade says she never interacted with any of them during the session, but many times she could spot them staring from the bushes before shyly disappearing again. Her endearment towards any and all consorts has developed quickly and intensely. You wouldn't suggest this to her face, but you feel like she might be comforting herself over the absorption of her dog with these scaly, slimy little things. The closest thing would really be Jaspers, but their rare interactions are still likely to result in flying fur and hisses. Not that you would really know, since you hide under the nearest furniture whenever you see his princess hat bobbling along. The consorts are okay, though. You can tolerate any living organism that'll let you rap at it.

 

     Jade picked the iguana up under its stubby arms and turned it around to face her. The second wriggled past the first and onto her lap, a smug look on its face.

     “ _Very_ bad,” she scolded. “ _No_ scratching.”

     The iguana blew a bubble that popped against the tip of her nose. Jade gasped, her mouth an offended O.

     “Are you using your 'bad dog' voice,” you asked from your chair.

     “Yup. And it does _not_ appear to be working,” sighed Jade, the iguana squirming in her hands. It made a sound in its throat somewhere between a gurgle and a growl. “They can be so sassy.”

     “Are you some sort of reptile whisperer now.”

     “What? No,” she said, one of her ears flicking in confusion. “You can't understand them?”

     You stopped leaning the chair back, and its front legs made a hollow thud on the floor. “Uh, no? Only the nakodiles can talk. Their stupid elongated heads give 'em more room for the speech-parts in their brains.”

     Jade blinked. “Well, firstly I'm going to ignore that that made no sense whatsoever.”

     “Okay.”

     “Second of all, those things cannot talk. I mean, I think one of them used Dave's sunglasses to message me once? But maybe technology produced inside of SBURB sessions just has a lot of advanced features, like... translating consort speech.”

     You laughed a little. “Okay, no, _that_ made no sense. You've never heard the crocs talk before? A whole gaggle of them literally ganged up on me last week.”

     She set the iguana down and crossed her arms. It plopped down in front of her legs, wrestling with the second for the seat on her lap. “Yeah, you threw a tantrum at them for no reason and chased them all away.”

     “Jade, they threatened to eat me.”

     “What? No, they didn't.”

     “Did too.”

     “Did not.”

     “Did.”

     “Davesprite!”

     You waved your hand in front of your face. “All right, well, the answer here is simple. Obviously we can only understand the dipshittery of our own consorts. Everything else sounds only slightly more annoying.”

     “Hm.” Jade ran her hand along the back of the second iguana. “Like our denizens. I would believe that.”

     “What can I say, I live to solve mysteries no one gives a fuck about.”

     “Thanks for cracking the case.” The first iguana squalled like a toddler not getting its way. “This one is probably a baby, though,” Jade said, scooping it back up to quiet it down. “I can only understand a little.”

     “Ask him what he thinks of my stunning visage.”

     “Why are you gendering the iguana?”

     “Better than 'it.'”

     “That's fair.” Jade let it crawl over her shoulder and into her hair, its body all but disappearing. “Psst, little iguana,” she cooed to its twitching tail. “Do you think Davesprite looks nice?”

     “You need to start naming them.”

     “No, no, I wouldn't be able to keep track.” Jade reached around to the back of her head and pulled the consort out, its blue legs kicking.

     “Name him Yiff Yiff.”

     “Oh my god, no. No one deserves that.”

     “That's what you think.”

     The iguana squawked in her arms, and Jade burst into laughter.

     “What. What'd Yiff Yiff say.”

     “That's not his name! And he says you look like a chicken.”

     “What the literal fuck. What the fuck. Why do all of these god damn things think I'm a chicken! If you're gonna make fun of me for havin' an egregious amount of feathers at least call me by the right species.”

     “They don't know any better. And I don't think he meant to insult you, it's the tone of voice that counts. He's just stating an opinion.”

     “Okay, Eliza, whatever you say.”

     Jade's ear swiveled back. “Uh, what?”

     “Y'know... like. Eliza Thornberry.”

     Jade shook her head a little.

     “'Cause like... y'know... she could like. Talk to animals and stuff.”

     “Is this a movie?”

     “No? Well, maybe at some point, I don't know. It was a TV show? When we were like, wee children.” You paused. “Forget I said 'wee.'”

     “Davesprite, I pretty much never watched TV unless it was also online.”

     “Nevermind then.”

     A lot of your jokes are a hit and miss. On Pesterchum, it was pretty hard to tell whether Jade was getting any of your references. Maybe she was just opening Wikipedia in another window so you wouldn't have to explain shit to her. Now, it's becoming clear that half of what you say is practically another language for her. Celebrities, movies, and other seemingly obvious pop culture wisecracks soar over her head. She smiles politely nonetheless, but the blank look on her face tells you she's probably thinking something along the lines of “what the hell is this idiot talking about.”

     Since then, you've decided it's time to teach Jade about pop culture. There's no better way to spend your day than schooling someone on a dead society.

 

 

     “Are you going to let me see what you're working on or what?” Jade asks, poking her head around your shoulder. You swivel your laptop screen away so she can't see the Powerpoint document you have open.

     “'Fraid not. This is straight confidential.”

     Jade continues to bob from side to side, trying and failing to steal glances of your screen. It's sweet of her to not just use her Jack powers to cheat.

     “By who?”

     You flap your wing out and pull it forward to block her view. “The CIA. Corvidae Instigators of America.”

     “Laaame.”

     Your talons click on your keyboard. “Can't come up with better acronym – too busy.”

     “With _what_?”

     “Educational material.”

     “I see. Have you received certification from the state for this?” Jade snickers. “I'm pretty sure you can't teach anyone anything without one of those.”

     “Seeing as the state has been demolished into a Big Pile of Fucking Nothing, I got the go-ahead from the President of Arid Wasteland and the Secretary of Nuclear Fallout to become a valid distributor of what I like to refer to as... mad knowledge.”

     “You're such a nerd. Lemme see the screen!”

     “No.”

     Jade flops back onto the sheets. “ _Ugh_.”

     “All in due time, Jade. All in due time.” You laugh under your breath as you make another dig into the Clipart inventory. “God. _Time_.”

     Jade raises a finger to her lips and shushes you.

 

 

     Truly, this is your magnum opus. The very distilled essence of everything you've ever worked to achieve. Future generations would weep, if they were not destined to perish before the thought of them could ever be conceived. Fuck Voyager _and_ its Golden Record – _this_ should be launched into space to be admired for eons.

     Okay, maybe you're exaggerating a little. Still, you're pretty proud of yourself. This is a big accomplishment, since you haven't been able to bring yourself to do almost anything you used to enjoy during these past couple months. And it looks better than anything you ever turned in for class, too. If you interpret “better” as “filled with shitty jpeg artifacts and purposeful misspellings” – which you do. You should give a pat on the back to your attention span.

     In the center of the battleship's hull is a long hall filled with shiny yellow computer monitors. If you wiggle the mice or tap a key, some of them still display black and green coordinate maps, their targets long since deactivated and eerily wiped from the screen. The two of you have made your way to a corridor off of this one, only Jade's feet making any noise on the orange tiles. The room in which you find yourselves is behind a heavy metal door at the corridor's end, and sort of resembles a university lecture hall. Rows of tables in semi-circles go up several levels, the front occupied only by a podium and a broad screen affixed to the wall. You set your laptop down and bend to open the podium up, revealing blinking boxes and tangles of cables. Jade continues ahead of you, her hands behind her back as she walks the aisle alongside the seating rows.

     “This must have been a battle debriefing room,” she muses to the ceiling. “Look, they've even left some of their folders here.”

     “Hm,” you acknowledge simply. You pull at a few wires and wrangle a cable out that can be connected to a port in your laptop.

     Jade ambles into one of the scratchy brown seats and plops down. She starts opening an accordion folder in front of her, pulling out documents. “Ah, see? The screen behind you used to display maps of Derse-held territory. Can you even imagine planning action for a battleground that was constantly changing form? That's so incredible.”

     “Yeah, I think our chess people felt pretty fucking bamboozled when Skaia never shifted past that big cube shape.” A plug won't fit into your laptop, so you flip it over and try again. “Like, they never stopped fighting down there, but you could tell they were confused. Rose would bring back these newspapers, and everyone was just like, 'uh, where's the fourth prototyping. Blah blah blah.'”

     Jade falls into an awkward silence, and you're grateful she can't see your warming cheeks from behind the podium. She doesn't like to think about her death in your timeline. Maybe she thinks you're comparing the two – though there isn't much room for that, considering she never did anything notably different except die. You should know how crappy that sense of being compared against another is. Being analyzed, picked apart, the validity of your existence not a given but a privilege to be determined. _Yes, you are X and Y and Z, but if only you were this, if only you did that differently. Maybe you wouldn't be where you're at now._ You should know by now not to stay that shit out loud. You clear your throat.

     “Anyway, I think I've got this hooked up.”

     “The screen is still black. You need to change the input.”

     “God damn it.”

 

     After some finagling, cursing, and switching of buttons, Jade pushes past you and fixes everything herself.

     "There,” she huffs, satisfied. “Now you can conduct your mysterious lesson in peace.”

     “Thanks. Feel free to take a fuckin' seat and get ready for the event of a lifetime,” you reply. She nods and walks away, leaping over the first row and sliding into a chair. You pluck a metal pointing stick from the top of the podium and extend it with a flick to its full length. “This is what they don't teach you in school.”

     Jade puts her legs up on the long desk that curves across the room. “How did _you_ learn it, then?”

     “Good question. Simple. You get this kinda stuff bestowed upon you when you're just walkin' around. Talkin' to people. You flip on a TV, you look out at some butt-ugly billboard they posted outside your building. It's a neverending lesson of subtle cues and years of socialization, taking many convoluted and – sometimes, yes – even nefarious forms.”

     “You already lost me,” Jade says, one of her ears swiveling back. You raise your palm.

     “What I mean is that this is the shit you're born and raised into. You don't get enrolled in it, and if you somehow fuck up and flunk spectacularly, there's not really anything that can be done for you except, like, have people give you piteous looks and stop including you in their jokes. 'Check out this poor chump, his parents never let him watch The Tee-Vee or drink sody-pop and now he's stunted forever.' Not everyone can teach you this shit in one lesson, but luckily for you I know basically everything there is to know.”

     “So, you're going to teach me about what, exactly?”

     You take a deep breath for theatrical effect. “Civilization, Jade. Civilization.” With a dramatic flourish, you raise your arm and hit the enter key to start your presentation, star-shaped transition effects and all.

 

     It's hard to tell where to start when recounting the history of a society to someone who was never formally a part of it. Jade barely qualifies as an American citizen, her idea of the country a foggy fever dream. You can look at pictures all you want, but nothing ever prepares you for the reality. In a loose sort of way, you guess you can relate. Nothing in cursory overviews of Greek mythology ever prepped you for seeing the lumbering Hephaestus himself in the heart of your planet's core. But for Jade, what causes the deep shock and confusion is much more mundane.

     “Wait! Pause for a second,” Jade interrupts several minutes in. “I have a question.”

     “Shoot.”

     “Is that picture just for show, or do people really dress like that?”

     Jade is referring to a stock photo you found of an old man in cowboy gear, a 50%-opacity website logo slapped over his cowskin vest. You thought it was a good idea to start with the culture you knew best – that is to say, that of your own state. Everything's bigger in Texas, and apparently more bewildering. If Jade can wrap her head around this slice of America, the rest should be a cakewalk.

     “Trust me, you can see grown-ass men in otherwise perfect business suits sporting this kind of shit. Church, the office, weddings, _funerals_. Makes no difference. You see that hat? That's ten inches easy. And it's completely normal. It's part of polite society.”

     Jade leans back again, blinking slowly. You think she looks more confused than before.

     You feel like a god damn Harvard professor. No one has ever gone out of their way to call you smart or studious, but today you suddenly have all the answers, and for once it isn't due to your head being downloaded with countless SBURB factoids. You don't know who to thank for this virtual doctorate. It might be your bro's disturbingly anal dissection of every piece of media that ever passed into the apartment. If he didn't shun being a Real Adult in any sense of the word, you think he might have been able to write god damn volumes upon volumes on sociological nuance. Or maybe it was just years of people-watching in class, your cheek in your hand, listening to a dozen conversations at once. Either way, Jade seems awestruck.

     She raises her hand frequently, an adamant exclamation point sticking up in the air. An alien visiting Earth for the first time, demanding to know the point of the little buttons at crosswalks. You start to laugh a few times, but hold your tongue so she doesn't feel bad. Getting all her information from media clearly didn't cut it.

     You get sidetracked halfway through your slides. Just for shits and giggles, you browsed for some pictures of anime conventions. You could easily imagine Jade in this kind of scene, totally in her element if not swamped with sensory overload. Some of these photos – particularly of fursuiters – were chosen for the express purpose of making her groan with distaste, but instead she bursts into laughter and claps her hands.

     “Oh _no_!” she gasps between breaths. “Oh no... I used to know a lot of people who did that kind of thing. Look at the... _god_ , look at _that_ thing!” she cackles, pointing at a rainbow cat with Tripp pants.

     “What. Who were these people. Why have I never heard of these creatures.”

     “Ohh,” Jade laughs, wiping a tear from her eye. “Gosh, I met them when I was about nine. I was kind of all over the place on FurAffinity. I talked to everyone. You pick up a lot of acquaintances that way.”

     “Why the fuck were you on FurAffinity if you were nine. That's enough to stunt anyone's childhood.”

     “Well, I didn't have anyone monitoring my Internet usage, did I?” Jade retorts. “And it didn't _stunt_ me. I turned out normal.”

     Neither of you say anything. Jade bursts into fresh laughter when you only stare at her with a slight smile.

     “Oh, shut up!”

     “I didn't say anything, feral child.”

     “Like you're any more well-adjusted. I could join _polite society_ if I wanted to.”

     “And polite society would be tickled pink to have you, but the question remains. Who were these people. How old were they. Did they ask you for your a/s/l.”

     Jade strikes a dramatic pose, her arm bent behind her head. “Who wants to know?”

     “They ask for pics?”

     “On FurAffinity, people only ask for pics of your fursona. Or theirs... or both at the same time.”

     “Holy shit, please stop while we're ahead.”

     Jade takes her glasses off to wipe the tear streaks from laughter off of her lenses. “You know, furries are actually fairly decent people. They taught me a lot about what 'real life' was like when I was too young to know any better. This one girl would always upload doodles from her math courses, and then she would complain about her classes in the captions. I learned a lot about school that way.” She sticks her glasses back on, the light from the screen making them appear as white circles. “It was a while ago, though, so I've forgotten most of it.”

     “Jesus Christ, Jade, you can't trust anyone on FurAffinity to give you an accurate depiction of what normal people are like.”

     Jade waves her hand at you dismissively. “I'll admit that plenty of them were weird enough for even _me_ to recognize it. For example: I know you put those pictures in there to poke fun at me –”

     “What? Nooo.”

     “Hush. I _know_ you did, but I'll have you know that I think fursuiting is over the top.”

     “Oh, thank fuck.”

     “Imagine the sweat! Imagine the smell inside of that thing. You'd get heat stroke like _that_ ,” Jade says, punctuating her sentence with a snap of her fingers.

     “Especially if you're wearing goddamned rave pants on top of 'em. Death by Jo Ann.”

     Jade covers her laugh with her hand. “Okay, I at least know what that store is because of all the people I followed who made fursuits.”

     “Well shit, look at 'em teachin' the youngins about popular brands.”

     “See? There's educational value in all virtual communities.”

     “I believe it.”

     “I didn't follow old people, either,” Jade continues. She stretches her arms above her head. “Most of them were my age. I learned a lot about what it was like to be an American kid from their little anecdotes. I always knew that talking to people online was a whole other game from talking face-to-face, but I feel like asking them questions about their lives, their schools, stuff like that... I don't know, it made me better suited to talk to all of you once we all became friends.”

     “So the furries made you socially adept enough to sweep us all off our feet with your charisma.”

     “Pretty much!”

     “Furries integrating people into polite society. Who woulda thunk it.”

     This actually makes perfect sense. Thinking back on your first interactions with Jade, it seems obvious now that her first experiences with online chatting came from hanging out in a network of furries and weeaboos. Even now, traces of her original overbearing cheerfulness remain, though she isn't at the lauded tier of Earl of Glompchester, Lord of the Colon-Three anymore.

     It took a while for her to get on your good side, and as the days passed she almost seemed surprised you hadn't blocked her. The two of you had spoken fewer than ten times before you effectively ironed out the use of the XD emoticon. She kept using it with Rose and John for quite a while, though. Maybe that was why you kept talking to her at the beginning – her other friends seemed cool enough, and if they liked her, then you should, too.

     You tap the floor with the pointing stick, nodding. “How much did you find out from them. Like, could you have flawlessly sidled into the public school system.”

     “Oh gosh, probably not. I don't mean to be snobby, but I don't think my grandpa would have sent me to public school anyway,” she says, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger.

     “Hm. You would have hated my school anyway. That's something I don't miss. Like, I'm suited for the environment 'cause I grew up there and I knew everyone, and even _I_ thought it was dark sided.”

     “How so?”

     The presentation has been idle so long that the screen turns a bright blue, bathing the room in neon light that makes Jade squint. You perch on the edge of the rounded table.

     “First of all, you would hate the state of Texas as a whole. We have no respect for the sciences over there.”

     Jade plants a hand on her chest dramatically. “Unimaginable! I would never think polite society capable of such atrocities.”

     “You know what my sixth grade biology textbook had in it?”

     “Do I want to know?”

     “No, but I'll tell you anyway. The whole section on evolution, if you could call it a section at all, was prefaced by this thing about how Darwin was never proved right and we can't know for sure if anything was true. Basically, bluh bluh bluh, dragons were real and we don't know why rain happens and it pisses us off.”

     “I feel faint already.”

     “No, okay. This kid next to me... his dad sent him to class with these post-it notes all sticking out of the pages refuting everything it said about evolution. Not that there was anything to roast anyway, since the book treated the whole fucking subject with about the same merit as _Weekly World News_.”

     “Adults believe this stuff?”

     “They eat it up.”

     “Did you ever wonder why that was?”

     You make a noncommittal hand gesture. “I really didn't until now. I've been in the game so long that it's like, surreal to reassess everything I knew about my city. Like, I can't even wrap my head around it. It seemed normal at the time, but havin' to explain it all, and after bein' removed from it for so long. Man. I don't know. So yeah. It's weird as hell that _grown-ass adults_ were like that.” You pause. “Well, the people my age weren't much better.”

     “What was school like, then?”

     You lean back with your palms on the cool linoleum. “I don't know.”

     “You really don't know, or you just don't want to talk about it?” Jade has her face in her hands, waiting intently for an answer.

     Your chest feels heavy now that the laughter has settled for a bit. There's always a sort of guilt that gnaws at you when you joke like this. Your fears drift to the ceiling like cut balloons until they weigh back on you, dragging you down from a temporary high. It's like your brain is reprimanding you for not spending 100% of your time in a soggy, tear-soaked ball. How dare you be happy when he's not here? The air hitches in your throat.

     Jade is still looking at you. You exhale.

     “See, the thing is is that nobody likes it. Literally anybody at my school would've rather gotten their leg caught in a bear trap than haul their ass over there every god damn morning. I mean, people would go to those extreme levels. Once I was at the bus stop and a girl literally tried to jump out in front of the bus, but one of her friends yanked her back in time.”

     “Oh my gosh, no, that's awful. That never happened.”

     “No, it didn't. But I could tell she was thinkin' about it.”

     “You're ridiculous.”

     “Ridiculously cool.”

     “Don't change the subject!” Jade turns her face away from the blue light of the screen. You're both swathed in it, and for some reason it makes you feel uneasy. “Seriously, I want to know. It can't have been _that_ bad.”

     “Yeah, I guess it wasn't.” Your tail flits along the edge of the desk. “I didn't try very hard, though. Like, the work wasn't difficult, but it just didn't matter to me that much? A lot of kids would, like... I would hear them bein' all upset 'cause their mom would give 'em a beatdown for getting a B+. But it's not like my bro cared, y'know? So I didn't either. I'm pretty sure the teachers thought I was tetched. If you don't treat their class like the fucking Olympics then you're a lost cause.”

     Jade stays quiet.

     “Almost got my phone confiscated a lot. Fuckin' _Mission Impossible_ even when I was sittin' in the back. You know how hard it is to type on a touchscreen when you're lookin' at the whiteboard?”

     “Oh my gosh, is that why you used to have so many typos?”

     “I got better, didn't I? A lot of those typos provided invaluable inspiration for new comics, too. That's what yuppie authors mean when they talk about living life for your writing.”

     Jade laughs. “Is that the only thing you got out of the experience?”

     “Well, I mean, it was definitely boring as shit. Food wasn't very good, either. At the end of the day I'd have to buy out half the fuckin' vending machine and go home with my bag rattling with an exorbitant amount of Doritos. They'd just sit in my closet for later. Balanced diet, right?”

     “I thought I saw some chip bags in there when I got your cameras for you.” Jade wags her finger. “You shouldn't keep trash in your room.”

     You shrug. “Maybe that's why I had such a birdbrain problem. Mystery fuckin' solved.”

     You don't tell Jade that the reason the crows were riding your dick all the time was probably because you had a ton of alluringly shiny, nest-worthy gadgets in your room. Actually, you kept your food way back in the closet behind some shoe boxes where none of them would be able to peck their way in. Can't go to bed hungry, after all. The whole “swords in the fridge” thing got tiresome the moment you saw a H-E-B commercial that revealed the awful truth of fridges being meant for food. You remember the smiling soccer mom setting a gallon of milk in the door of the fridge, and for two hours you had to lie down and reassess your life.

     Jade leans forward and rests her chin on her arms. “What would you have done if you didn't have to go to school, then?”

     “Wow. I don't know. That's the thing about school, isn't it? When you're there, you'd rather be anywhere else, but once you're on break it's like, you don't have that routine to give you any kinda structure, so you're just drifting through each day. But then class starts again and you realize that it's not any better than being home.” You sniff and look at the ceiling. “I liked being able to get out of the house, though. I guess it was just something to do.”

     The room is quiet, only the fan in your laptop continuing to whir loudly.

     “Sometimes it took me, like, two hours to get home. I mean, taking the bus back would have only taken fifteen minutes. But I never really took the bus both ways.”

     “Why?”

     “I just like walking. Or, I did. Can't do it anymore, obviously.”

     “Right.”

     “Just don't see what the point is of rushing home if there's no emergency. I never heard any complaints about getting home late, either.”

     “What do you even do for two hours?”

     You shrug your shoulders and scratch your feathery ruff. “Dick around. Just walk. Count steps. One time I got up to three thousand steps before I got distracted and lost count.”

     “That's a lot.”

     “It's all right.”

     If you were a more serious photographer, walking home would have given you a lot of great material. Your favorite hour was around five or six in the evening, watching the sky bleed orange and red. The sun would glint off of an office building or two, the windows lighting up with bright yellow that you could only stand to look at because of your shades. If you glanced up from the sidewalk at any point, it would have been just before the sun's sinking. Man, that could have been a sweet photo series. You wouldn't want to ruin your cred, though.

     “Geez. I would probably get overwhelmed just walking in a _small_ town,” Jade sighs. She closes her eyes and rests her cheek on her forearms. “These puppy ears can only handle so much at a time.”

     You extend your wing, prodding her with one of the feathers. She crinkles her nose at you. “Nah, you woulda liked Houston. Not like it was any colder than Hellmurder Island. You saw a lot of dog walkers, too. Most of them would let you pet their dogs. But I guess that's mostly true for any city.”

     “I'm officially won over. How ever did you know that dogs would be the way to convince me?”

     “Intuition.”

     Jade closes her eyes, looking almost ready to fall asleep. You keep watching her as her mouth settles into a small frown, and you can tell that this line of conversation might be tiring her out. It's been a while since you've talked at length about something with a semblance of gravity. For her, this might be liking recounting all the details of a party she wasn't invited to. You suddenly wonder if maybe this whole thing was a bad idea.

     You still aren't sure how the whole “end of the world” thing makes you feel, either. You're doomed anyway, so it's not as though you had a bright future that was cruelly extinguished by the game. You put that concept to bed – having a future outside of SBURB, you mean. But for Jade... well, for her it's different. Always sitting on the other side of the wall, hearing the great hubbub of society taking place only feet away. She could have done something with her life. Your eyes sting.

     Jade opens her eyes and blinks up at you. Her face is calm. A couple months ago you might have tried to guess what she was thinking, but you don't bother anymore. You just hope she's not lamenting being stuck here with you.

     “I used to think about it all the time,” she says quietly. “During the slow hours. I would be in the garden or at the tide pools, and I would spin these hypothetical situations of what it would be like if I lived somewhere else. Anywhere, really. It didn't matter to me.”

     Your hands fidget at your sides.

     “It probably sounds silly,” she sighs. “Remembering some of the things I would imagine for myself... it was all so idealized. It helped, though. It helped when things got bad.”

     You finger some of the remaining stitches down your torso. Most of them have been taken out – leaving a ragged, raised scar – but the sutures keeping your initial prototyping wound remain. “I get it,” you say. “I did something pretty similar.”

     Jade looks surprised. “You did?”

     Well, shit, you shouldn't have brought this up. If it helps Jade feel better, though, then you suppose you have no choice. This is something you've thought about a lot. On the bus, in the cafeteria, in the hours walking back from school, in your room. Like living with ghosts, imagining for a clear moment what it would be like if your friends were with you, then turning around and being genuinely surprised when they weren't there. It got worse during the game, while you were rereading months-old logs and hoping that maybe, _maybe_ they would log in again. You clear your throat and continue.

     “I mean, it wasn't the same thing. Like, uh. I would spend a lot of time thinkin' about these ridiculous scenarios where we all lived in the same neighborhood, y'know? Just bein' able to hang out. I guess that's sorta the opposite. It was a fun concept, though.”

     Jade grins and hides her face in her arms. One of her ears flicks.

     “What, are you thinkin' about what a dweeb I am.”

     She lifts her face. “I always think you're a dweeb.”

     “Shucks.”

     “Okay, so, what did we all do in these 'ridiculous scenarios?'”

     You can feel your cheeks start up again with their stupid yellow glow. You're setting yourself up to say something you shouldn't. “Uh, I don't know. Stupid teen stuff. Chase pigeons and loiter in the Denny's parking lot.”

     “Loiter? That's what you spent time imagining?”

     Well, no, but she doesn't have to know.

     “That's what teens do, Jade. They loiter. Leanin' all up on the building, givin' looks to the old folks who just wanna eat their grits. One foot on the wall, hands in the pockets. We'd be the neighborhood menace.”

     “I can't believe you thought I would terrorize polite society like that.”

     “You don't know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. I told you I was an enigma.”

     “You are _not_ an enigma!” Jade reaches forward and smacks your forearm. You flick one of her ears with your claws, and she sticks her tongue out. “Also, I'm still having a really hard time picturing any of this.”

     “Are you saying my carefully chosen array of stock photos and Clipart isn't doing its job.”

     “No, your graphic design choices have nothing to do with it! It was always kind of difficult for me to comprehend that the outside world was real. I would see little snippets of it in the oracle clouds, but it wasn't the same.”

     “Man, I forgot about that. I'm kinda jealous that you guys got the fuckin' Fairyland wizard clouds and we had to have Othkkartho breathing down our backs with his fleshy octopus beak. What kind of stuff did you even see.”

     She looks to the ceiling, thoughtful. “I didn't start having many visions of other places until I was eight or nine. They were always there, but they only picked up once I got Pesterchum and started talking to you all. At that point, I suppose Skaia registered you as fixtures in my future and started revealing more.”

     “That's so sketchy. Skaia, what the fuck. Can't a guy have his peace without island children scopin' him out from a mystical oracle planet.”

     “Don't be such a baby! There's nothing sketchy about the clouds – everything they unveil is key to understanding the future, not an arbitrary way to invade someone's privacy. For one thing, watching the clouds helped _me_ help _you_ guys be better prepared for the game.” Jade looks back at you. “Whether you knew it or not.”

     “Okay, well, what did you do when you were littler. Seein' all our personal goings-on without knowin' it was relevant to the imminent apocalypse.”

     Jade smiles fondly and looks at the desk, linking her fingers together. “I always knew who you were. It was just a matter of being formally introduced.”

     “Wow, that cracks it. You just won the prize for most obliquely nefarious thing ever said. Please step forward to claim your reward of deluxe binoculars and a plastic bush to hide behind while using 'em.”

     Jade rolls her eyes. “As I've told you before, I woke up on Prospit very early. I talked to the White Queen a lot. If you had left your dream tower, you would know how informative the royalty can be.”

     “Doubt it. Derse doesn't actually support the cause of its players, remember.”

     “Well, this had only minimal relevance to the game. It doesn't do any harm to explain who the other dreamers are, does it?”

     “I mean. I guess not.”

     “The White Queen didn't think so, either. I knew from very early on who all of you were, if not in the most superficial way. I remember being... seven? I asked her whether I could go to the purple moon to meet the other children.”

     “What'd she say to that.”

     “A resounding no! Derse is very dangerous for Prospit dreamers.”

     “No shit.”

     “I had to be satisfied to watch the clouds after that. I thought that if I kept note of everything, then maybe I would understand everyone better when it came time to be introduced.”

     “'From the desk of Jade Harley: Dear Diary, there's this super cute boy in the most dreamy pair of anime shades I've ever seen in my life –'”

     “Davesprite!” Jade smacks your arm harder. Your laugh comes out like a caw, and you spend a solid minute trying to prod each other in the shoulders.

     “That's all kinds of precious, though,” you admit once Jade is done assaulting you with pokes. “Sorry for busting your chops. It's not actually creepy.”

     “Thanks for telling me what I already know!” she says, delivering one last prod.

     “It's what I do. But yeah. In retrospect, it's kinda reassuring? If that makes sense.”

     Jade tilts her head. “In what way?”

     You sigh through your nose. “Just knowing that someone is watching, y'know? Even if it's not in real time, or you never know when it's happening. The idea of there being a witness... it sounds. Nice.”

     You think about how many snapshots of your childhood have passed across Skaia's stratosphere, unfolding for anyone looking up. Hopefully no tiny Prospitian children got scarred for life by seeing Lil Cal's face in the sky. You picture a tiny Jade, poking her head out of some bright yellow globe in the sky and seeing anywhere from your bro owning the shit out of you on the rooftop to, uh, any other one of those occasions. You hope she didn't grow up thinking that's how most guardians are.

     “Are you all right?” Jade asks.

     “What?”

     “You looked kind of concerned for a minute.”

     “Oh. Nah, I'm fine.” You scratch the back of your head, and a couple feathers drift out like you're a poorly sewn pillow. “Hey, do you wanna trash this whole thing and watch a movie or something?”

     “After all those hours of labor you put into that glorious slideshow?” Jade teases.

     She's kidding, but her ears have swiveled forward from the tense position against her hair that they've been in until now. You wonder how long she's been humoring you, unwilling to tell you how strenuous this stream of consciousness has been.

     “Fuck it, who cares. Hey – can you see like, a little cabinet in my living room under a big TV?”

     You catch a glimpse of a chartreuse flickering behind Jade's eyes before she closes them to scan your apartment. She's always precise when plucking things from your place – you don't really want her to see the apartment in its current state, even if she's already seen it onscreen as a server player, so her retrievals are quick and straightforward. Of course, you don't know this for sure. You just have to trust her when she says she isn't invisibly snooping through everything.

     “Yes, I see it.”

     “Cool. Uh, does anything look good? I don't care either way.”

     Jade frowns. You can see her eyes moving behind the lids, thumbing through DVDs remotely. “Um... well, I don't know what any of them are.”

     “Oh. Uh. They're all shitty anyway; Bro got most of them for The Ironies.”

     “It's always The Ironies, isn't it.”

     “Obviously. Forget it – let's just torrent something. Not like the Internet cops can come after us now.”

 

     You spend the better part of twenty minutes with your laptop sandwiched between you on the desk, pointing at jpeg compressed thumbnails of movie posters and deciding which one to illegally download. Jade isn't familiar with any of them, and judges based on how pretty the posters are. The sheer fact that the Internet still loads in this liminal space drives her up the wall, and she practically starts shrieking about scientific improbabilities when your file of _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ successfully begins downloading. During the time it takes for the movie to prep itself, Jade eventually calms down from her rage over the blatant disrespect SBURB shows towards the laws of physics.

     “ _Anyway_ ,” she huffs. She pushes her bangs back, the dark red in her cheeks fading. “I hope you didn't insist on this movie to be sardonic about it. I'm not so confident in my ability to enjoy things that are genuinely bad.”

     You hold your hands up. “It's funny you mention it. The more I think about it, I'm not sure I really hated any of the movies I used to rip on. Maybe it's because they've graduated into these relics of a dead civilization, but now I actually think they're pretty endearing?”

     Jade laughs. “Whoa, seriously? I never thought I'd see the day.”

     “Yeah, yeah, take points off of my street cred, whatever,” you reply. “I don't know if it's personal growth, or just looking back fondly on shit that's preferable to the current situation.” Your fingers fidget. “I was just messing with him, you know? I mean, I didn't like them as much as he did... but I guess John's taste in movies wasn't terrible.”

     A heavy silence hangs between you. The third person pronoun is passable, but Jade has grown averse to hearing or saying John's name aloud. She turns away from you swiftly, her hair hiding her face. Her hands wring in her lap. You feel nauseous. But then the loading bar fills up, and your computer's video player springs open, and after clearing her throat it's as though Jade was never upset at all.

     “All right, Davesprite, I hope this was worth those five rounds of rock-paper-scissors.”  
  
  
    The debriefing room is so dark, and you find yourself squinting painfully to determine details on the screen. In short, you realize that your glasses are annoying as hell. You try to remember the last time you took them off that wasn't for the purpose of washing your face, and cannot come up with any particular instance. With Jade around, they've been glued to your face.

     It's been a long time since wearing the shades indoors has been an inconvenience, and that was only on technicality. In elementary, your bro filled out a bunch of faked paperwork to attest to your “eye problems,” which required the use of sunglasses in class. In your own timeline, Rose attempted on numerous occasions to persuade the shades off of you, claiming that they were hindering your ability to listen to the prophecies emanating from the Veil. But what did you care? They could tell you nothing you didn't already know. So you kept them on, and the black of the Medium became blacker still.

     But now the familiar overlay is irritating. Your fingertips tap the frames, sliding them just a bit down the bridge of your nose to test the waters. Your vision isn't blurry, which is a relief – one of Rose's frequent warnings when you refused to take them off was that your sunglasses were going to permanently fuzz your eyesight. The sliver of clearer sight past the dark shades is appealing, and it's all you can do not to take them off.

     Why were you wearing these again? Oh, yeah, because of your bro. Why was _he_ wearing them? And why should it still matter? But, then, they were also a gift, weren't they? Yes, it has nothing to do with Bro anymore. Taking them off would be disrespectful to John, you think. You wonder if he would care. They were a gift, yes, but they were meant for alpha Dave. Or at least, that's how he might have rationalized it. Maybe, you think wryly, he wouldn't have wanted you to keep wearing them. If that had been the case, you think you would have worn them just to be difficult. The bottom of your lungs feel heavy.

     Maybes, maybes. You should stop putting words in his mouth while you're ahead. Beside you, Jade sniffs and flicks a strand of hair from her face. You can't even tell where the edge of her hair turns into the black of the darkened room. What was it you told her when she asked about doomed timelines? To 'make the most of it?' What a shitty thing to say. It has some merit, though – you weren't bullshitting her entirely. Maybe making the most of it includes seeing the world clearly for what it is.

     Your fingertips linger at the temple, shaking slightly. You count down from three, then chicken out, then count down from five. Five... four... three....

 

     It is without fanfare, or angels descending from the heavens, or the essence of the universe cracking in half that you reach up and remove your sunglasses from your face. You wait for something to fall from the sky and smash your head open for your transgression, but none comes. Objectively, nothing has happened. But you _feel_ different, and the world appears different, both figuratively and literally.

     You blink in the darkness. Everything is crisper in a way that you only really noticed in the fluorescent lighting of the shower. You can identify the podium in the darkness, can see the slight shadow where the screen is attached to the wall. You rotate the aviators in your hands, feeling the thin metal frames, and you cannot tell whether this moment could be construed as poetic.

     You're so focused on the glimmering of the lens, on the tiny reflected movie screen playing out in the small black shades, that you don't even notice Jade looking at you. You jump when you see her in your periphery, looking at you with an expression that is neither awe nor curiosity. She examines you quietly, her mouth curved into a small smile. You wonder if she can read how prepared for lambasting you feel. The scene onscreen brightens, and the artificial white illuminates her face. You want to punch yourself for wearing those sunglasses in front of her all this time. It wasn't until now that you noticed how green her eyes are.

     “Your eyes are cool,” she says simply. Not _Why the hell did you take those off, those were practically your entire brand_ , or _Put those back on, you're freaking me out_. Just... your eyes are cool.

     Your throat is dry. “Really?”

     She nods, making the curls of her bangs bounce as she smiles wider. “Yeah, they're so _orange_. I wouldn't want to wear sunglasses if I were you.”

  


     “Shit, Jade, I'm blushing,” you say, voice cracking. Jade turns back to the movie. And like that, the subject is dropped. No fanfare. No angel choirs. No fiery apocalypse. You continue to look at her even as her hair conceals you from her vision.

     Your heart does not sink, nor does your breath run ragged as you recognize the reality of your situation. Instead, you feel calm. Your hands do not even shake in your lap as you finally accept that your crush on Jade Harley has never gone away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (chewing gum) less than ten chapters....
> 
> the thing about the post-it notes in the book is based on something a girls dad in my freshman biology class did. my soul basically left my body. or maybe it was in eighth grade? hm. well, whatever


	17. Chapter 17

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 05 July, 2009

 

     In the void that sits between your session and the next, the air is alive. It makes your hair stand on end and your forearms prickle, like whenever it had just rained on the island and the air was temporarily cool. There's an electric tang to it, the taste of metal from the ship mixing with the tickling static of your powers keeping the ship adrift. And there's a constant rushing, something Davesprite likens to driving through a tunnel with the windows down. You are traveling just shy of the speed of light, but it's nothing like how you'd imagine blasting down the highway to be. Your loose hair and the fabric of your shirt are only slightly tussled as you help the ship continue its mad dash.

 

     This battleship was the first thing that caught your eye in the ruin of Skaia, a stain of brilliant yellow against the monochrome. You picked it indiscriminately, lifting it up with hands that felt lighter than air. Every cell in you coursed with an invigoration you'll probably never feel again. The Green Sun was, is, a great unfathomable thing, vivid and bright behind your eyelids. It almost overwhelmed you, almost made you sway and collapse in your ruby slippers – every corner of the universe flooded your sight, seeing every last minutiae like you could reach out and touch it. Nothing out of bounds, nothing that could shy from your fingertips. You felt like you were hovering outside the borders of your body. No wonder Jadesprite couldn't handle it. Far from burning you, the Sun was a pleasant fizzle that lived under your skin and made you feel very, very... _alive_.

     When you died, you barely felt the heat of the whorling flames before there was a crunch, a heavy weight that crashed through you when you hit the ground – and that was it. Over in a wave of heat. You were pretty upset when you woke up in the dream bubbles. You patted your face, frantic, and in the window of some projection of a Prospitian cathedral window you could see your eyes clear and white. You might have cried, but you don't really remember. You paced in your evening gown, still smoking and frayed, until that nice troll girl swung by again and told you that you would wake up again soon.

     _I'd advise you to get ready_ , she said. Her glittery red wings fluttered behind her, which distracted you almost enough to not understand what she said next. _Your friends are going to need you in a moment_.

     _Yeah, not a good time to keep up the national tradition of you guys fucking up everything you touch_ , her rude friend added, making her elbow him in the ribs.

     Aradia left you with some reassuring words, a much-needed update on your friends' well-being (How could you have forgotten? Well, it was a relief they weren't dead), and brushed a bit of smoke from your face. Then your body felt lighter, and you sensed yourself fading, and she waved goodbye – sending you off to your new life.

 

     The sky – can you call it a sky? – flickers with blurry streaks of yellow and white. You watch your skin, how it reflects the pops of impressionist color. The two of you sit at the edge of one of the battleship's towers, the massive radar scanner looming behind you. It pauses in mid-scan from where it once swiveled throughout Skaia's atmosphere, perked for any sign of Dersite aircraft. This ship has many dormant war mechanisms still standing. They're eerily still, as if waiting to resume their duty to mow down anything violet. Massive turrets are pointed straight ahead at some mysteriously disappeared enemy, the golden beams of a catapult lying low against the deck. The shadow of the radar is faint, cast across you and becoming geometric down the spires of the battleship's front. Below you is the back window of the admiral's captain, the glass shimmering with the reflection of the Yellow Yard. You feel infinitely tall.

     Sometimes you just need to leave the hull. LOFAF can lose its novelty, and the constant din of carapacian feet thunking around in all directions sets you both on edge. It's much quieter here, and seeing the ships trajectory clearly helps you focus on steering. Not that there's really much to it – guiding the battleship is a reflex, a background program running at all times.

     “So... yeah,” Davesprite finishes, drumming the steel with his claws. “That was one hell of a preamble, wasn't it.” He coughs. “Anyway, I promise there was a point to all that word vomit.”

     “What is it, then?” you prompt. It sounds like he's about to say something serious for the first time in days. Your ears are perked.

     “I, uh. What I wanna ask is. Or not really ask, but I guess request?” He rubs his neck.

     Once, you wouldn't have been able to read the full expression on Davesprite's face. But now that he's ditched the glasses for a few days now – something you're unwilling to bring up unless he does it unprompted, which is unlikely – you can tell how nervous he is.    

     “I'd... like to be called Dave from now on.”

     You push your glasses up, surprised. “Really?”

     Admittedly, this _is_ how you thought his speech would end. You didn't think he'd ever spit it out, though. Davesprite got around to this topic slowly and with a slew of tangents, talking about the nuances of the human language, and what do honorifics really mean anyway, and how all those extra syllables inserted in our everyday conversations are a tragedy because they're preventing us from saying more important things before we all die. You listened patiently as he let his point trail further and further away from him, putting off whatever he was leading up to. But now he looks like he regrets asking.

     “Really. Just dropping the suffix completely. Hot potato, y'know?”   

     “I... of course. I'll honor your decision if that's what you want.”

     Davesprite releases the breath he's been holding. “Yeah, it is. I've been thinking about it for a while.”    

     “How long is 'a while?'”

     “I don't know. A few days.”

     You purse your lips. It's a wonder why he's only thinking of it as a problem now – it's been almost three months, and being called Davesprite didn't seem to bother him.

     “Are you really _sure_?”

     “What do you mean by that.” His voice returns to its monotone, as if it makes up for the lack of sunglasses clearly displaying his anxiety.

     “Please don't take this the wrong way,” you start. Davesprite tenses up like you're about to tell him he's been voted off the island. “I'll call you whatever you want to be called. But I... well, it's hard to explain.”

     “No, go ahead,” says Davesprite, unmoving.

     “How do I word this?” You try to talk with your hands, but end up looking like you're grasping at invisible balloons. “I don't want to... disrespect you?”

     “Uh. Gotta tell ya, Jade, I'm not followin'.”

     “What I mean is, I don't want you to think I'm. Conflating you with the other one?”

     Davesprite raises one eyebrow, and your cheeks warm.

     “The alpha Dave, I mean.” You cross your ankles in embarrassment, toes flexing.

     Davesprite sighs heavily and leans back, his arms stretched behind him. “I still don't think we're on the same page,” he says. He smiles slightly. “Can you explain your reasoning?”

     You fold your arms.

 

     It's true – you don't know how to pinpoint the differences between Davesprite and his alpha equivalent. Even the term “alpha” makes you uncomfortable with its implied hierarchy of relevance. But they're there, no matter how ephemeral. Perhaps you're just more attuned to how prototyping changes you. Well, actually, the complacency of over a decade of death made Jadesprite a crick in your neck, not doomed timelines or existential crises – but you're sympathetic anyway. It would be audacious to say you relate, though. You were the frustrated player, not the shunned spare.

     You know now that people can be very different in person compared to how they are online. Maybe you're making it up in your head. Three months is so much longer than... how many hours did you spend with Dave? Four? Five? Maybe it wasn't enough time to glimpse the fragments you've already seen of Davesprite. But neither the time disparity nor your recent personal tragedy is enough to account for how Davesprite stands apart from your memory of Dave.

     They make themselves apparent in small ways, easy not to notice if you aren't looking. For one thing, his jokes have acquired a morbid, sour edge, his smiles gnarled at the corners in a way that makes you wonder if he's serious. That might be the crow side, aided by the rasp of his voice that lends deadly seriousness no matter the subject. You read in one of your glossy encyclopedias that crows can be jokesters, can be mean-spiritedly so. But that's another way he stands apart – the way he always sheepishly tells you he doesn't mean it, even if you already know. Anxious not to offend in a way Dave was not.

     Davesprite's persona is not Dave's roll-with-the-punches variety, either; rather, he gives off the impression of someone whose nerves are so bad that they've solidified in their veins, freezing him in place so that at times he can't even budge a smile out of his horizontal mouth. His chill is the calm before the storm, the quiet when all the birds retreat from the air and even the clouds seem to be rehearsing for the grand cataclysm, still quiet and contemplative for the time being.

     It isn't off-putting, the strings ready to snap that you can feel winding up inside of him. You don't feel compelled to take shelter, to let him unravel somewhere that allows you to escape the disaster area. That would be unfair, you think. You aren't much better yourself. But your plan of action is nonexistent, an abrupt blankness that lives a step beyond the immediate present. How do you unwind the strings without breaking them under the pressure of your fingertips?

     Ah, well, he's still waiting for an answer. Hopefully you'll word it correctly. You wish you had the chat client between you, if only for its ability to hide your discomfort, to give you time to practice.

 

     “It's only that I can tell how you're different from him.” You focus on the railing of the battleship, watching their outlines hiss with chartreuse. “You're not the same person anymore. I don't want to make you think that I'm seeing you as... I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying.”

     Glancing over at Davesprite, you can see that a nerve in his jaw is twitching. Your heart sinks. That was exactly the sort of offensive screw-up you _didn't_ want to say.

     “Not really sure how to feel about that,” he replies. He clears his throat. “Like, after all the shit I've already lost I'd at least like to hold onto my name. I don't think keeping my identity is too much to ask for.”

     His tone stings. Davesprite was so visibly fragile when he broached this request, and now you've fucked it up by hurting his feelings anyway. You feel like disappearing.

     “I'm sorry,” you murmur. “I'm not trying to upset you.”

     “Maybe you can tell me what you're trying to say, then.”

     “I think you already covered it,” you falter. “You've gone through things the alpha Dave could never understand, especially now. He's not going to get it.” You look at Davesprite from the corner of your eye, and you can see he's slumped forward to rest his elbows on his lap. “If you want to drop the differentiation, so be it. I just thought I'd let you know that I see you as a unique person.”

     The rushing air in the void makes a curl of hair bob annoyingly in front of your glasses, and you brush it away.

     “It's not _bad_ ,” you flounder. “There's nothing wrong with becoming different. We change when things happen to us, you know? It doesn't mean I like you less than before. It doesn't mean you're not still my friend.”

     Davesprite nods slowly, and you relax a bit. “Yeah,” he says. “I know you didn't mean anything by it. Wasn't trying to be a drama queen. Sorry.”

     “Did it bother you before? Being called that?”

     He shrugs. “It sorta freaked me out for a while, 'cause I thought that maybe y'all were keeping me in my place or whatever. I get why you used it now. Thanks, I guess, for... y'know. Explaining it to me. ”

     “You really thought we'd do that to you?”

     “I think a lot of shit that makes no sense. Maybe my brain's just hardwired to assume the literal worst in any situation. I couldn't just _ask_ you about it without being certain you were lying to make me feel better. So I just kept letting you call me that.”

     You look down. “You should tell me when you're uncomfortable. Sometimes you make it really hard to tell when something is wrong. I need to know, okay?”

     Davesprite sighs through his nose. “Okay. I'll try.”

 

     You digest what he's already said, waiting for him to say something else. His feathers flutter in the wind, and he picks at the scales of his arms absentmindedly.

     “It kind of messed me up, when he told me I wasn't real,” he says finally.

     The air in your throat hitches, and you want to be offended that he could say anything against your brother.

     “I thought I could convince him at first, y'know? He's just so fucking _stubborn_ , though,” he murmurs. “I thought I had better claim to the alpha since I had worked harder. But then I wasn't so sure. Like if you're trying to use a treadmill as transportation and then gettin' pissed when the guy next to you is farther ahead 'cause he's on a bike.”

     Your expression softens. “Do you still feel that way?”

     He makes a noncommittal gesture. “It's weird. Like, I'm sure I'd hate having to spend three years with the guy. I think I'd probably fuck off to some corner of the ship so I couldn't horn in on his Dave-ness. Don't wanna make it confusing for people, right? So I feel like I should be happy I'm the only Dave here, but that's not really what's happening. I still feel....”

     “Like you're waiting for him to take over again?” you ask quietly. He nods.

     “I'm not sure anymore whether it's related to being doomed,” he says. “I think maybe I didn't like being me to begin with. Maybe I just want him to take back that job so I can... well, whatever.”

 

     It's a gentle, slow-burning sadness that seeps into you as you realize there's more to understanding someone than seeing snapshots of their lives inside the clouds. Something like shame follows the sadness, and you accept that you don't understood Davesprite nearly as well as you thought you did.

 

     “ _Wow_ ,” Davesprite says after a while. He forces a laugh. “Jesus, that was kinda depressing, huh.”

     “Um–”

     “You don't have to answer any of that.” He shudders as though it'll shake everything he's just said out of his memory. “Just forget it, okay.”

     “No,” you reply. Davesprite blinks, taken by surprise. “I'm not going to forget it. Not everything has to be a joke all the time. Do you understand that? You're going to have to be serious with me sooner or later.”

     He looks away, his cheeks warming yellow. You might be embarrassing him, but you keep on.

     “You don't have to brush off these kinds of things, okay? I want to be able to help,” you say, quieter this time. “I want to understand.”

     Davesprite stares at some far-off point, and you wonder whether he's got a snappy retort brewing in his head. _Easy for you to say_ , you imagine him saying. _Miss “No One Needs to Know My Grandpa's Dead.”_

     _You're right,_ you respond internally. You'll have to live up to your own standard. Maybe your subconscious was subtly kicking you just now.

 

     You wait and wait for him to answer. Awkwardness makes you feel glued to the steel, unable to even shift your position. You're hesitant to look at him even when he sighs in resignation and turns his gaze back to you.

     “Ditto,” he says simply.   

     When you nod, he relaxes and flexes his wing back.

     “Thanks.”

     “For what?”

     “I think I just need some sense shaken into me sometimes. Thanks for verbally slapping the shit out of me.” He scratches his jaw. “And sorry for being a downer.”

     “You're only being a downer if you're content to stay miserable,” you reply.

     Davesprite smirks. “Noted.”

 

     When the conversation lulls, you always feel it physically. It feels like being under a bedsheet after someone has spread it out with a flourish and let it slowly sink on top of you, a silent draft of air preceding the eerie sensation of being swallowed whole. It can't be shaken off, just clings to you. The compulsion to teleport as far away as possible smothers you. You have to suppress the lightning crackles and the flickering neon of your subconscious desire to escape.

     “So,” starts Davesprite. You swallow your gasp. His eyebrow twitches when he sees you flinch at his voice. “What was that like anyway.”

     “What was what like?”

     “You know, like....” He trails off and makes some sort of hand gesture like he expects you to finish his thought for him. “Like, the whole frog breeding thing. How did that go.”

     Your ankle cracks when you flex it suddenly. “I was confident in the result. The tadpole seemed genetically sound. You should have seen it – it was so small, and it had this shine to its skin. It was iridescent, almost.” You laugh. “There was nowhere to put it once it was born, so I had to place it in an 8 ball.”

 

     You smile at the memory of the little thing, how it had wiggled its tail in a way that made its tiny body shimmer like stars. Its birth was underwhelming – over in a rainbow burst of light that burned your eyes, and then you had to rush to scoop it from off the ground. It flopped in your palm as you panicked with the 8 ball, cracking open the front panel and fishing out the fortune-telling die with your fingers. Alcohol probably wasn't the most ideal swimming environment, but it seemed to like circling inside the sphere anyway.

     It made you feel kind of silly at the time, but you felt strangely attached to it. “Maternal” isn't the right word, but affection was there, if not the satisfaction of having seen its creation all the way through to the end.

     It's a shame the little guy fell into the volcano, 8 ball and all. Luckily you never named it, so you don't pine for your creation as much as you might have. The lava is where it needs to be. Over the next few years it will sink to the heart of the planet – you imagine Echidna guarding it in her sleep, coiled around it with her miles-long tail. Too bad it'll never grow up. A tiny universe doomed before its start. Stillborn, almost.

 

     “No, that's not what I meant,” Davesprite says haltingly. Your ear flicks. “Like, stories about baby frog universes are cute and all, and I'm down to hear more about it later, but... I meant like, hanging out with Dave. What was _that_ like.”

     “Oh! I, well....”

     Davesprite inhales. “I mean, forget it if you don't wanna talk about it. Word got around that it didn't... end too great.”

     “No, it didn't.”

     “Do you wanna drop it, then.”    

     You shake your head. “Just give me a second.”

 

     A few different images come to mind. First is the tiny sight of him on the horizon, a little harder to pick out now that the snow has begun to melt, making the mossy terrain squish underfoot. Somehow it spooks you even more than when that imp slung you all around the session trying to escape your bullets, landing you smack dab in a swarm of time-traveling wannabe stock marketer Daves. But you weren't really paying attention that time. This is different. A shout lodges in your throat. You stand up on a slick boulder, slipping a little, and wave both your arms. You think you see him pause, then he raises one arm so low that his hand doesn't even reach above his head.

     Second is the first few minutes after he arrives. You don't remember much of that. Your brain kind of flips out trying to access the folders on how to talk to living humans. The memory of you backing up when he tries to give you the adopted younger sibling version of the Christian side hug is probably something your head inserted after the fact – it doesn't feel real enough to have actually happened. You already have your instructions from Echidna. You debrief him so quickly that you trip over the words, and he seems grateful for the distraction.

     Third is the forest at some indistinct point in time. Hours go by and no matter how far you reach into the trees, everything still looks the same. You stick a bayonet on your rifle and use it to swipe hanging vines out of your way, which sometimes explode into showers of red petals when you accidentally slash open a flower blossom. Dave stays several yards behind in a constant state of lagging. You don't think he means for you to hear him, but you catch muttered complaints anyway.

     “Lovin' the viscosity here. Somewhere between cartoon quicksand and walking in literal tapioca. Watch out world, I'm comin' your way at a quarter mile per hour.”

     “I can smell the athlete's foot incubating in my toe cleavage as we speak.”

     “This is why the kids in _Lord of the Flies_ went apeshit on each other.”

     You know when to glance behind you and see if he's stuck when the suction cup noises of his feet stop. He always has a grossly exaggerated grimace on his face until you set your plastic terrarium down, the frogs inside ribbiting, and pull him out of the mud by his wrists.

     And finally, that dumb, dumb dog.

     You don't remember much of fighting Jack Noir, either. It happened very fast. What you do remember is the silence after your gunshots stop echoing in the clearing. You remember turning around very, very, slowly, every muscle locking up, how your vision splinters at the sight of all that blood. It's a new record. Jack whines in his throat and circles you nearly on four legs, sniffing the hem of your dress and trying to bunt his head into your open, twitching palms. You scream and pound his head hard between the ears with your fist, and his yelp comes out human-like before he retreats into the trees. He lingers just in sight for a while, his jointed hand gripping a trunk, ears flat against his head.

     It feels like a long time, watching the blood darken and seep into the snow. But it's probably only a few seconds before your mind pulls out all the stops and you start freaking out. Even after you resume your quest alone, you still feel sort of sleepy from crying so hard. It's the kind of sob you haven't experienced for a while, the kind where you can't breathe and every puff of air is like emerging from the deep end of the pool. You crouch on the ground when you can't stand anymore, and your responses to Karkat are almost unreadable because you just can't type.

     You think this might be the moment he _really_ starts trying harder to be nicer to you, rather than saying he's going to while maintaining the same toolish demeanor. Maybe it's hard to keep calling someone names when you've had to persuade them out a panic attack.

     Dave's body is heavy. It almost makes you burst into fresh tears to feel the blood rushing between your fingers. No time to waste – dream selves can't wait forever to wake up. The metal taste fills your mouth, though you try to have as little contact as possible. You drop him immediately, then stumble towards the bushes to vomit.

     Afterward, you sit down and yank the flats off your feet. What an impractical fashion choice. You're mad at yourself for how much they've already slowed you down. You put on some decent running shoes with Dave's bleeding corpse only yards away, and past the curtain of your hair you can feel Jack staring. Both shoes tied, you stand up with a crack of your knees and flick the blood from your hands. Work still needs to be done.

     Aradia is the one who tells you, in those few minutes of limbo, that Dave was prepared to get shot all along. She explains it as the Time player's burden – knowing that some things are inevitabilities without being able to tell anyone. Your eyes burn, and you feel the bile rise in your throat. At first you try not to blame him for not knowing this was the second time you've been made to shoot someone you love. Via dog, no less. You wonder whether Dave would have still kept it a secret if he knew. How childish, how uncooperative must he think you? You thought you had made a pretty good impression, too. How could he still not have any faith in you?

     You don't ask her how she knows this. It occurs to you later that time in the Furthest Ring is a null concept. Perhaps this Aradia is from the future, where all of your friends are getting to know each other without you and the tale of your session has been laid out folk ballad style. Maybe Dave told her about it in the hopes she'd find you here and let you know. This seems unlikely. You would like to think he would have passed on an apology as well.

     Burying the dead doubles is eerie. There are hundreds of them, slumped and bleeding and cracked open and twisted into inhuman shapes all over LOHAC, all over LOFAF. You want to look away, but you can't – there _is_ no looking away with the sight of a First Guardian. You phase them into the ground all at once, seeing every last one disappear. Reclaimed by the earth.

 

     The anger and the grief that sideswipe you makes you clench your teeth, and it's probably the hostile arch of your ears paired with the slight baring of your teeth that makes Davesprite ask if you're actually okay. It's like shutting the blinds on everything. The small smile you produce is probably unconvincing.

     “It wasn't fun,” you say with a strained voice. “Certainly not something you'd save for the photo album.” You lick your lips and look below you, at the sharp drop to the deck of the ship. “It might sound selfish of me, but I really had high hopes for meeting everyone. I thought it would all go so perfectly, you know?”

     “Yeah, in retrospect that sounds pretty goddamned fanciful.”

     “I guess if anything can go wrong, it will.”

     “Don't I fuckin' know it.”

     “Not to be melodramatic,” you say, “but Dave really deserves a punch if I ever see him again.” You hold your fists out in front of you like a boxer. “Bam, right in the jaw.”

    

     The keyword here is “if.” You still haven't told Davesprite about the blueprints and the intricate step-by-step plans that butt their way into your head while you're trying to sleep. The Furthest Ring is the perfect route to cover your tracks, especially if you're running from charges of criminal negligence. One step into that writhing abyss – that's all it would take. It would be better for everyone if they didn't get their hopes dragged through the mud by some poor, doomed Jade. Better to leave it a mystery. They might wander for a while, wonder where John and Jade could have possibly gone, and you can't imagine it would be very long before the timeline just....

 

     Davesprite laughs out loud, and instead of being uneasy over your desire to physically assault another version of him, you think he looks kind of relieved. “Damn, Jade, what's got you all riled up? Lay that fresh gossip on me.”

     Your heels thump against the steel as you swing your legs. “It's still so unbelievable. He didn't even... I mean, he didn't....” Your place a hand over your mouth.

     “He didn't what?”

     “He didn't tell me that I had to kill him,” you murmur. “I can't understand it. I know I had to, that it was a temporal inevitability... but he didn't even _tell_ me.” You raise your mouth from your palm and look at Davesprite. His mouth is slack jawed.

     “It was all over the place, you know? It stayed on my hands for hours. There was so much.”

     Slowly, Davesprite begins to nod. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

     Before the tickling in your nose turns into something more severe, you blink away the wetness in your eyes and clear your throat.

     “I didn't really talk about it with anyone other than the troll who was helping me out at the time. I feel strange trying to articulate it now. Sorry. I don't think I go on.”

     “S'okay, I get it.” Davesprite cocks his head. “What did the troll have to say.”

     “He um. Told me how to revive people. I think the conversation was more embarrassing than actually having to do it. He sort of had to talk me out of a complete breakdown.” Davesprite looks down, frowning. “But it was... helpful, overall, I suppose.”

     “Which one was that? I lose track in the collective swill of their dumbassery.”

     “Gray text? Seems like his caps lock button is broken?”

     “That vaguely rings a bell.”

     “His name is Karkat. He and one of his friends helped me out a lot after Dave died, since they had to deal with the same quest during their own session. I couldn't have done it without them.” You laugh a little. “His personality still needs major work, though. Very abrasive.”

     Davesprite snorts through his nose. “They sound like upstanding citizens. They both alive?”

     “Yeah.”

     “That's good.”

     “Mhm.”

 

     You let your eyes unfocus, honing in on the thing that sits in your direct line of sight. The fenestrated window lingers on the horizon, not much bigger than a dollar bill. You hate that fucking window. It agitates you to see it. You always push yourself to detect what lies behind it. You can see each atom in the panes of glass, edging further to the other side until you almost _feel_ the draft on the other side, but then your sight blackens like a firewall popping up and you lurch back, startled.

     Davesprite looks at you questioningly when you sigh a little.

     “What're you thinkin' about.”

     You shake your head.

     “Nah, come on.”

     The words that try to leave you become tangled in your throat. You attempt to pick them apart with your fingers.

     “They're all doomed, too,” you say finally.

     Davesprite says nothing, but you think you see a shiver ripple through him.

     “They just don't know it,” you add. “They don't know at all.”

     “No,” he whispers. “They sure don't.”

 

     It was always hard to imagine the scene in your head when Davesprite would tell you about those long nights on Derse, just sitting on the windowsill and watching those doomed little lives continue in the city below. But right now, you think you've come pretty close to the same thing. What did he say – that he wished it wasn't your problem? You understand what he meant now. All those poor carapacians. Your poor friends. They have no idea.

 

     Your brow hurts from how deeply it's furrowed. Davesprite reaches out and taps your wrist softly with his fingertips, and to your surprise you don't start at all. When you see the look on his face, you feel like some great achievement has finally been reached, some curtain unveiling to reveal the fabulous reward. Without sunglasses, you can identify the soft, gentle concern in his orange eyes. It isn't pity, or even really sympathy – just an uncomplicated desire to understand. You can't imagine any joke, any dismissive comment coming from him for just this once. He looks more genuine than you've ever seen him.

     No other course of action occurs to you. A deep shudder runs through your chest, and very softly, you lean on Davesprite's shoulder.

     He inhales sharply, something akin to a heartbeat fluttering inside him that you can hear against his skin. You feel that he never really exhales, just lets the air slowly and quietly escape through his teeth. The feathers of his left wing graze your back as he extends it behind you, folding it like putting an arm around you. You close your eyes.

     This feels like déjà vu. When was the last time you did this? It must have been that fourth night, when you fell asleep on Davesprite's bed. You've changed a lot since then with regards to tolerating being touched. As long as you're the initiator or can at least see it coming, human touch no longer causes the intense feeling of being crowded no matter how light or accidental the contact.

     The two of you maintain a careful balance that toes around the borders of nuance and context. Being prodded or pulled on to get your attention still makes you leap out of your skin, but the tickling brush of Davesprite's tail over your ankles does not. Nor does the occasional hand grazing your arm while one of you is fast asleep. Nor is this, your head on Davesprite's shoulder, his cheek on the top of your head, and his only good wing wrapped around you. This is okay. This – this touch serving only to remind you that someone is there – you could get used to.

     “Hey,” Davesprite says after a while. You blink slowly, your face so pressed to his shoulder that you can feel the words from the inside. “I know you literally just ripped on me for this, so this is totally hypocritical of me. But you know you can like... talk to me about stuff, right?”

     “I thought I already was,” you say. Your words come out as squished as your cheek.

     “Well, yeah, you are, and I appreciate you trusting me and all....” Davesprite clears his throat. “But you can talk to me about other stuff, too. Like... stuff I might not prompt you about?

     Unease prickles at your forearms. “What do you mean?”

     You can hear him swallow. “I mean. Jade?"

     You wait.

     “I wasn't actually asleep last night. I could hear you.”

     Damn it all to hell, and you thought you had done so well training yourself not to cry unless no one could hear. He must be really good at keeping his breathing regular – you would have never guessed. You squeeze your eyes shut, drawing your shoulders together like you're cold.

     “I know it seems like I have no idea how to deal with that kind of heavy emotional stuff, and I guess I have a lotta work ahead of me. But I can try, y'know? Like, shit. Shake me awake or something. It's not like toxic waste is shooting out of your eyeballs.”

     Despite yourself, you giggle a little, and Davesprite's tone becomes lighter.

     “Remember the contract, Jade. You're gonna get dealt with no matter what. It's a legally binding document, y'know. You signed and initialed it.”

     “I remember the contact,” you say. “I'm sorry. I would like to insert an addendum, though.”

     “Shoot.”

     “Just let me cry it out, okay? I can't talk very well when I cry.”

     “That's a fair trade-off, business partner,” Davesprite says. He makes your head bob a little when he laughs to himself. “Shake on it?”

     “All right.”

     He extends his hand, and you shake it with a theatrical embellishment. The skin between his fingers is leathery.

     “Consider the contract updated. Pleasure doing business with ya, Jade,” says Davesprite with finality. You can hear the smile in his voice.

     “And the same to you, Dave.”

 

     Davesprite slings his arm around your shoulder, so cautiously that you have time to prepare for it. His forearm gets half-buried in the curls of your hair, and this time your sigh is one of contentment.

    

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> man that pic turned out so busy.... anyway.... #dunkedon #owned #nothinbutnet
> 
> ds is still gonna get referred to in-text as ds to avoid confusion.... hopefully i remember to make jade keep calling him dave tho LMAO


	18. Chapter 18

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 10 July, 2009

 

     There are two indisputable facts you’ve learned today:

  1.       You are two steps away from learning what a burst eardrum feels like.
  2.       Your shoulder has never been so sore.



 

     “God _damn_ ,” you mutter, rolling your shoulders back. Jade’s rifle makes your arms shake from the weight of it. Its little red diamond insignia clicks under your impatient claw.

     “Wow, Dave, what did the wall ever do to you?” Jade laughs from behind her hand. Her snickers echo.

     You grunt in response. Beyond your intended target, a stretch of foam wall padding is smoking, dotted with the craters of misfirings. You take your nose between your thumb and index to escape the stench of gunpowder.

     “That wasn’t so bad, though,” calls Jade. “A little haphazard. Be sure to actually use the scope, it’s there for a reason.”

     “Noted.” You lift the gun again, scrunching your mouth in concentration.

 

     Jade scared the shit out of you this morning. She lay awake so silently and for so long that you had no idea she was already awake when she lurched upright, whipping the sheets off of her legs the same way a superhero would don a cape. You bolted to alertness with a hiccupping heartbeat, one that you could feel with your palm pressed between your chest and the mattress. As you sat up and kneaded your pulse into regularity, Jade was already pacing wildly around the room.

     “Where’s the fire?” you asked weakly, clearing your throat to shake out the sleep. Some sort of urgency was simmering in the way her hands flitted about her – like she was having a conversation with someone in an invisible corner of the room – but she didn’t seem to hear you.

     Jade pulled her hair out of its crumpled ponytail and yanked it back into a tighter bun high up on her head, long black wisps making spirals about her ears. Then she strode to the closet left ajar, forcing open the whining door and letting the results of Baby’s First Alchemization Session spill out.

     “Let’s see….” she murmured under her breath. One leg ventured into the darkness of the closet, and she folded herself halfway over to tug at something lost in the junk. You heard a clatter of metal and plastic, and what Jade ended up pulling out was a bright green assault rifle.

     Your neck feathers fluffed up, and without meaning to you ended up shouting “Oh!”

     Jade looked at you blankly, stance wide as she propped the rifle in her arms. You were suddenly reminded of a rerun of _Snapped_ you caught once at midnight when nothing else was on but infomercials.

     “I am just so _antsy_ today, you know what I mean?” Jade said. Her tone lilted like she was proposing taking a stroll through the park, totally mismatched from her distracted, distant expression. The hair on your neck stood up.

     “Can’t say I relate. Kind of tired, really. But you seem… excited,” you managed to reply. You stopped yourself before you said something like, _You haven’t even loafed around for the traditional full six hours_ , which you thought might hurt her feelings.

     Jade cracked a grin, drawing a sigh of relief from you. She slung the neon rifle over her shoulder with a mechanical rattle, placing her other hand on her hip.

     “Wanna learn how to shoot?”

 

     So you’ve started adding marksmanship to your list of skills that are next to useless in the liminal asscrack of reality.

     You got off to a rough start. It was kind of embarrassing to have something taught to you literally step-by-step – you were never old enough to remember those first fumbling sword-fighting lessons with your bro. But she’s eased you into it as best she could, showing no impatience when you couldn’t make sense of any of the rifle’s mechanisms. Jade bit back her laughter, encouraging you even when you did everything wrong. And by everything, you mean _everything_. Even after watching her do it, you loaded the magazine backwards at least four times.

     Your makeshift shooting range isn’t too bad, either, but you think the sheer emptiness of the space is only making the rifle reports more deafening. One of the many mysterious rooms that sits locked in the battleship’s underbelly is a huge gymnasium, bigger than the one in your old school. Even Prospitian soldiers in the midst of a war get antsy, too, you guess. The steel doors echoed into the high ceiling when they closed behind you, your trailing tail perfectly reflected in the floorboards. Soundproof enough, Jade thought. Maybe from the outside, at least.

     At the far end of the gym she’s placed a number of mannequins that came free with the package when she alchemized her dresses – crisp and velvety black, they wobble a little when you fuck up and send a bullet racing past the edges of their shoulders. The difference between your mannequins and hers is clearly visible – hers are riddled with bullets, ragged and starting to sag, whereas yours have scuffed torsos at best. You think your subconscious might be making you miss on purpose.

 

     “Remember to mind your gait!” calls Jade from the sidelines. You turn to give her an incredulous look, and her hand flies to her mouth.

     “You know what I mean!” she adds. She swings one foot over the ledge of her perch, the Green Sun Streetsweeper draped across her lap. “Having no legs does not excuse improper posture.”

     “What exactly am I fucking up this time?”

     “Tilt yourself to the side more,” Jade motions. “No, the _other_ way. There you go.”

     “Okay, am I good now.”

     “Um… almost. Hold on!”

     Jade pushes herself up and walks to where you float in the middle of the gym. You inhale sharply when she aligns herself behind you, her hands lightly straightening your elbow and correcting your grip. Like fixing a flower arrangement.

     “Make sure your elbow stays in that spot, okay? Don’t hold it so loosely.” She adjusts your right arm, forcing it into a deeper V shape, and you’re glad your scaly bird skin isn’t susceptible to goosebumps. Her hands are always so warm.

     “Don’t overthink it,” she murmurs. The butt of the rifle digs into your shoulder as you stare at the black mannequin yards and yards ahead. You can only imagine the Rorschach blots forming under your skin. “As soon as you feel everything’s in place, just go for it.”

     Jade backs away from you, which you take as a hint to try again. You squeeze one eye shut, peer through the scope at your disembodied torso of a target. You focus the crosshairs on the center of its chest, brace yourself for the kick, and –

     “Hey, you made contact this time!” Jade claps with delight and bounces on her feet. You only barely hear her praise past the fading echoes of the reports, your muscles complaining. The mannequin still wobbles on its base, a clean hole ripping through where its collarbone would be. You shudder.

     Jade beams with pride, oblivious to your discomfort. “You’re getting better already! Imagine what a sight you’d be in-session.”

     “Bird with a gun. Yeah, I’d wanna see that, too.”

     “We would have won the game in minutes!” she laughs. “A rifle in every hand solves any and all problems.” Her hand hesitates at your shoulder blade to pat it jokingly, but her face falls when she sees you aren’t smiling.

     “Is something the matter?”

     “Are we actually being serious here?” you ask. “Like, are we training for something? Or are we just dicking around?”

     Jade hesitates, pursing her lips and exhaling through her nostrils.

     “A little of both,” she starts. “It’s never good to be out of practice.”

     You chew on the inside of your mouth and let the rifle fall to rest against your tail. “I think you’ve graduated from ever needing actual weapons ever again, though. You could just, like, snap your fingers and take someone’s skeleton right out. Fuckin’ wasted.”

     Jade makes a face. “That wouldn’t be a fair fight, would it? Definitely not much fun, either,” she says.

     “Damn, we playin’ with our food before we eat it?”

     “Possessing space-warping powers is not a free pass to end what _could_ be an even duel in a fraction of a second. That’s called hubris,” she huffs.

     “So, we’re legit training then? Am I seeing some mysterious glimmers of optimism here?”

     Jade’s mouth twitches, and she looks past you at a holey mannequin. “I just want to feel like I’m doing something.” She rubs the back of her head. “I’m sorry. It must seem like I’m using you to fill the time.”

     “What? No, this is… fun. Like, I’m pretty sure my arm is about to dislocate, but….”

     “When you improve, it’ll stop hurting so much.” Jade smiles again. “I mean, _I_ can do it one-handed. All it takes is practice!”

     “Show-off.” You flick her nose, and she crumples it. “Is practice why you don’t even use the scope, or is that Jack powers?”

     “No, I’m just far-sighted.”

     “Color me convinced.”

     “Either way, you’re doing very well.” Jade pushes back her bangs. “I wouldn’t want to leave you poor and defenseless on the battlefield.”

     “What the fuck. Defenseless? Jade, my sword is literally _part_ of me.”

     “Haven’t seen you use it! In fact, I haven’t seen that sword at all.”

     Oh, fuck, where _did_ you leave your sword? You’ve already forgotten. You squint as you try to remember when you last had it, and Jade seems to read your expression, but she doesn’t argue when you sputter out, “I just didn’t need it.”

     “Well, to pay me back for today’s lesson, maybe you could teach me how to use a sword? I’m sure there’s plenty in my house I could use.”

     You swallow, fingers flexing between the rifle’s grip and thumbhole. “Oh, um. Actually, I don’t really think that’s. A good idea.”

     Jade cocks her head. “Why not?”

 

     How do you even begin to explain it? The sound and the smell of it sticks with you – the clang of metal scraping metal, the strong leathery odor of the hilt that clings to your palms even after you’ve washed your hands. A phantom sensation ripples through your torso as you remember how it felt to have the cool steel of your sword resting in its organic sheath, an uncanny prickling you felt if you so much as shifted your stomach muscles.

     It was always so easy to slip up. Though your years of training left you conveniently ambidextrous, that was really where the benefits ended. Your hand-eye coordination left much to be desired, and as soon as you thought you had made the right move, Bro had already slipped out of range and reappeared behind you to knock your sword from your hand with one swipe. He never cut you any slack for your slow reaction time, and didn’t seem intent to teach you to grow out of it.

     Prototyping has eliminated the scars that accumulated on your knees and forearms, but a few nicks remain around your shoulders. A collision with the concrete edge of the rooftop doorway, that time you needed fourteen stitches from slicing yourself accidentally with your own fucking sword. You stared out into the hospital hallway at a guy gesturing wildly to the woman he was with, trying to read the small white font across his hoodie. When the nurse finished sewing you up, you didn’t notice because you finally realized it said “ _I’m not always sarcastic… sometimes I’m sleeping!”_

     How do you begin to explain how his blood seeping into the phosphorescent soil had mixed with the splashes of radioactive gold you were leaking everywhere? Jade may have been able to find the words, but even her curt way of putting it only skims the surface. _There was so much_.

     It webbed between your fingers, leaving yellow-red streaks on everything you touched. In the end, it was the ground’s sulfuric stench as it steamed with the smoke of Jack’s fire that got you to push yourself upright. Your vision blurred, kaleidoscopic, when the blood rushed to your head. For a while you kneeled in the puddle of gold, glowing faintly as it sunk into the wet, azure earth. Simply getting your breath back, panting weakly and pressing your hands to your gut to stop the blood from rushing further. He stayed in your periphery all the while.

     You must have shed half your weight in feathers all over him, hands hovering above the hilt that still stuck from his chest. How many times had this same sword drawn your own blood? You felt bad for finding a final irony in your bro’s death, then simply felt broken when the tears didn’t come. Even now, you still haven’t cried. What you felt was closer to apprehension. You expected him to lurch upright, peel the sword off of him like an arrow headband and clock you over the head with it. But he was never the type to lie so silently and so patiently – not in the open, at least. You didn’t think to check his pulse. As the minutes passed, acceptance budded in the back of your head and crept forward from there. He had to be dead, his body so unnaturally bent and stiff. It made you feel worse when apprehension shifted to relief.

     You can’t remember any sentimental thoughts you may have had, any normal sadness that might have passed through you like any sensible kid after losing their god damned guardian. It was so strange to have him back after those long months of his absence, and just like that he was gone again. You didn’t even get to talk. It felt like another cruel joke being played on you by Skaia. It knew you desperately wanted something that the alpha Dave could not inherit from you, and it gave you what you wanted. You’ll always be the one who saw your brother, your bizarre ecto-father, go down with his own sword skewered through his chest. That final image is yours alone.

     You remember now where you left your sword. It was when you had drifted waveringly down the hillside, passing fields of neon mushrooms before arriving at those enigmatic mail chutes sticking out of the ground. The Parcel Pyxis was how you were able to get a few full rolls of medical gauze, shooting out of the top with a comical _pop_ after only a few minutes. At the time it seemed appropriate to return the favor, so you wiped your sword off as best you could and stuck it down the Pyxis. You hoped it wouldn’t launch out like a spear and gore some unwitting little lizard.

     It’s gone, then. Nothing else of your battle with Jack remains. You don’t know whether this should be a comfort or not.

     So much for training being useful. When it came down to it, you were no more prepared for SBURB than your friends who _hadn’t_ been tossed around atop their houses for years on end. Resentment bubbles acidic in your throat. What’s the point of ever handling a sword again? What has it ever achieved that can’t be accomplished another way?

 

     “I just don’t think I’d be a good teacher is all. It’s kind of hard for me to show people how to do things.”

     You leave out the parts where you’re so out of practice that you could easily fumble, how simple it would be for one of you to slice the other open. Just imagining the sound of two blades clattering up against each other is enough to turn your stomach. You can’t do it. You won’t.

     Maybe you’re projecting, but Jade seems to get the idea. Her eyes flicker, watching you closely until you look away.

     “Is that all?”

     You shrug.

     She licks her lips, hesitating before she speaks again. “I understand. This used to be a big hobby of mine, and I still enjoy it, but… the sound is what gets to me. I feel like I can still hear how it sounded. It’s unmistakable, bullets entering a living body. You don’t forget it.”

     You stare at the floor.

     “Sorry. Forget I asked, then.”

     Jade seems embarrassed, her mouth set in a tiny grimace, so you clear your throat.

     “Honestly, swords are kinda boring compared to this,” you say. “I kinda like that there’s more that goes into it, y’know? Like, with swords pretty much all the responsibility is on you to not fuck up with handling a giant knife.”

     “Firearms require less responsibility? Exactly what I would expect from someone who grew up in Texas.”

     You try to turn your sudden laugh into a cough, which makes Jade laugh harder in turn. “Yikes. Shouldn’t have told you about them stereotypes.”

     “I see what you mean, though,” she says. “Both you and the rifle have to play nice in order to pull everything off. Sometimes, it’s not your fault if something goes wrong. But only sometimes.”

     “Whereas if you fuck up with a sword, then you’re just a stone cold idiot.” You pause. “Shit, I just roasted myself.”

     Jade notices you massaging your shoulder, and gratitude crashes down on you when she holds her hands out to take the Girl’s Best Friend from you. She vanishes it into her sylladex.

     “You could have let me know if you wanted to quit! I forgot how rough it can be when you haven’t become accustomed to it.”

     "I don’t know. You just seemed into it.”

     Jade pats the back of her head to feel if her bun is still in place. “I was. But you don’t have to keep playing along if you don’t want to.” Her hands shimmer chartreuse, and the rifle she left across the gym appears in her arms with a crack of yellow lightning. “Just another second, okay?”

     You float away to give her space. “Okay.”

     Though you know she could carve cursive out of those mannequins with one hand and a good squint, Jade takes the rifle with both arms and nestles it in her shoulder, her stance firm and steady. Her eyes lower to see through to the crosshairs, and you think you see her mouth twitch before she fires, bright fire crackling at the end of the barrel. She doesn’t flinch, and the whole thing is over in only seconds. The mannequin you’d been using falls backward with a rattle that reverberates into the ceiling, looking like a turtle on its back.

     Satisfied, Jade drops the Streetsweeper to her side, and you can’t detect even a hint of discomfort, of any sign the assault rifle has bruised her relatively slight frame. You stare with your mouth open, temporarily dazzled.

     “I really needed this,” she sighs. The gun disappears, and she stretches her arms above her head. “Thanks for coming along. I would have felt kind of weird training in here alone.”

     “No problem,” you sniff. “I could stand to do this again. Will have to do a shitload of push-ups, though. Build that upper arm strength.”

     “You can do push-ups without legs?”

     “If you expect me to ‘mind my gait,’ push-ups shouldn’t be that hard, either.” You turn to leave the gymnasium, and Jade jogs to walk alongside you.

     “Oh, promise not to shoot at Jaspers, okay?” she says.

     “Got it. With great power comes great responsibility.”

     Jade rests her hand on your folded wing, and you will your feathers not to fluff up. You wonder if you’re just being used as a cane; Jade moves slowly, a dullness returning to her tired face. As you walk out into the main corridor you feel more confined, the walls suddenly constricting to ensnare you.

     “Hey, what time is it?”

     Jade blinks wearily. “Only 11:30.”

     “Jesus _Christ_. Ain’t even noon and it feels like we’ve spent all day in there. I’m conking the fuck out when we get back.”

     “Same,” Jade yawns. “I think I got too excited too quickly. I’m just so worn out all of a sudden.”

     “Take it easy next time.”

     “Mhm. Next time.”

     Sighing quietly, you drape your elbow on her shoulder. She leans toward you more heavily, and you make a gagging sound at her.

     “You smell like gunpowder.”

     “So do _you_.” She looks up to stick her tongue out at you.

     You can’t really say your heart ever beats normally given your abysmal situation, but it relaxes you to know that Jade is still capable of joking with you. You don’t know what you’d do otherwise.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> christ, this was supposed to be less than half the length it ended up being. speaking of length, this chapter took SLS to over 200 pages in ms word. i luv 2 have fun
> 
> the next four chapters all take place on the same day, then there will be only 2 chapters left until It Happens. i might publish the next four all at once? none of them should be TOOO long, but sometimes they get away from me... like it did in this one... hm....


	19. Chapter 19

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 17 July, 2009

 

     The hallway is never silent. Life on the battleship is sort of what you imagine it’d be like to live in a high-rise apartment tower, the lives of countless people swirling around you in thumps and pitters and bursts of echoed laughter that snake through the vents and stir in your Bec-ears during the early morning. Late at night when the room is pitch and the only light comes from the emergency fluorescent installed outside your door, you might see the shadow of someone passing by and feel your fingers twitch, an instinct to kick the sheets off and catch up with friends.

     It makes your heart ache to hear the carapacians. The background radiation of their presence fills you with the sludge of guilt, a reminder that you have holed yourself away from the world like an insect under a rock. Only feet away, they are already worlds apart from you. The chess people used to be your only string to civilization, their company a stepping stone toward learning how to properly speak to members of your own species. You wished away your waking hours wanting to return to Skaia’s golden moon, wanting to feel the gleaming brick underneath your feet, to walk among those people who called you their princess. Your childhood drawings never even looked like you – they were all stout little hairless stick figures, their skin never colored in except when yellow crayon bled outside the lines.

     Now you can barely stand to be around them. You feel utterly lost to them, a rift opening up so that neither can understand the other. Stepping out of your bedroom is like entering a new dimension, and you wonder how it is that the metaphorical world has not stopped spinning for everyone else as it has for you. How can daily life continue in the absence of your brother? How can anyone go on at all?

     But then again, you still haven’t told anyone.

     On one of the first mornings you woke up on this ship, you blinked in the yellow space and swiveled your ears, registering a couple of Prospitians ambling around the corner towards your room. For a fraction of a second, you were convinced you had woken on Prospit. You prepared to crawl out of bed, to drift out the window and see what was new with the townsfolk. But then the sheets resisted against the weight of Davesprite sleeping at the end of your bed, and you blinked as you recognized the steel-plated walls of the battleship. A million snapshots of the past week crashed down on you – the smoldering carpet, the smell of oil, lying face-down in the atrium amidst a pile of ripped-down drapery – and for a few minutes you folded into yourself, clutching your chest and willing your consciousness to stay inside the frame of your body. The Prospitians passed by your room with clicking footsteps, and you dug your fingernails into your collarbones to ensure your skin had not gone numb.

 

     Today was one of those rare mornings you left the door cracked, letting a stream of yellow light coast in and illuminate a thin triangle across the room. Your phone told you it was already 5:39 P.M. The front of your head was pounding from sleeping in too long, and you kneaded your temple with two fingers, squinting at the glaring strip of gold outside. You blinked slowly and started to roll over, but when you opened your eyes, the light was blocked by a long shadow.

     “I don’t expect you to have known this, Jade,” Nanna said from the doorway. “But it’s not considered polite for a lady to stay in past ten in the morning.”

     “Oh god, _please_ don’t open the–”

     You pressed your face into the pillow when she pushed the door all the way open, flooding the space with the canary yellow of the hall. Davesprite groaned from his spot, and you heard him slap his hands over his eyes.

     “Nanna!” you protested.

     “My eyeballs are sizzling,” Davesprite whispered.

     “I was only kidding about the ‘ten in the morning’ nonsense. Lord knows _I’d_ sleep in until noon if I didn’t have a ship to feed.” Nanna spun something into the air and caught it in her floating hand, something you recognized as a bright blue spoon materialized from her sprite powers once your eyes adjusted to the light. The spoon dissolved into static, melting into the palm of her hand. “Regardless, it’s time for the two of you to rise and shine!”

     You rubbed your forehead, skin throbbing from your migraine. “Is something going on?”

     “As a matter of fact, something _is_ going on. It’s called dinner, and it isn’t optional!”

     “I’m not–”

     “Ah, ah, ah!” Nanna interrupted, hand raised defiantly. The bottom of her tail bobbed up and down against the floor like an impatient, tapping foot. “I won’t hear anything about anybody not being hungry! Kids your age are _always_ hungry.”

     “I don’t need to eat,” Davesprite whined, pulling the sheets over his head.

     “That makes no difference to me! What the two of you need is a good, old-fashioned family dinner – as close to one as I can achieve in this place. And I won’t put it off any longer.”

     Nanna coasted into the room and yanked the sheets off the bed in one motion, making both of you squeal and curl up into the fetal position. Her hand took you by the forearm, and you shuddered to feel the texture of it – it had a consistency like gelatin or rubber, staticy to the touch. Before you knew it you were being pulled into the hallway, rubbing your eyes with your palm to wipe the sleep out. You hoped that, being bald, the chess people wouldn’t mind the mess your hair was in.

     Davesprite slunk after you and closed the door behind him, scowling in the light. The harsh fluorescents made him look all washed out, his yellow-orange tail nearly blending in to the color of the metal floor. You looked back at him, exchanging a sympathetic look.

     He scrunched his eyebrows together. _Can you believe this shit?_

     You widened your eyes and rolled them almost to the back of your head, making a ghastly face. _What are we, twelve?_

     Davesprite snickered under his breath at your expression, and Nanna shot a look back at you that silenced you both. You walked to the kitchen in silence, but secretly you were a little pleased to be part of such a seemingly normal domestic event. The mother calling up the stairs, the teenage daughter rolling her eyes at her phone. Something clicked into place then.

 

     The kitchen is crowded, as close to a mess hall during Skaia’s wartime days as it could get. You, Nanna, and Davesprite all sit at the barstools around the kitchen’s only island by the sinks, but the long rows of tables around you are flecked with black and white heads buzzing with conversation, clinks of silverware, and the sounds of hard elbows resting on metal. To say the least, you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. Hundreds of different words from carrying conversations make your Bec-ears twitch about.

     You eat very slowly, your stomach feeling suddenly shrunken. When was the last time you ate something? You vaguely remember eating a bruised pear from the atrium, but cannot place whether it was last night or the night before. Nanna watches you eat in a way that she must think is unnoticeable. Her eyes dart to you every few seconds, watching you take cautious bites of elbow pasta.

     “Man, shit’s like Thanksgiving dinner. Take like two hours for everyone to read off of cue cards of what they’re thankful for,” Davesprite mutters into his plate. Nanna looks at him over the rims of her glasses. “Sorry. Stuff’s like Thanksgiving.”

     “Christmas in July,” you blurt out. You’ve hardly registered anything that either of them have been saying these past ten minutes.

     “Believe it or not, this is actually a rather slow time in the evening for me. Usually we far exceed maximum seating capacity,” Nanna sighs. She swirls her wine glass (filled with ice water) and drinks it contemplatively. “I’m a one-woman staff around here!”

     You know she’s actually satisfied to be doing something productive and time-consuming – the weariness in her features are that of gratification. A small smile still tugs at her mouth.

     “Yeah, seriously, what do these guys even do all day? Like, they think they’re tourin’ the Mall or somethin’? Fuckin’ can’t go five minutes without a herd of them going off god knows where. Where you goin’, bud? What’s your _destination_?” Davesprite says. He meets Nanna’s eye again and wipes an invisible bit of food off of his mouth. “Sorry. Can’t go five freakin’ minutes.”

     “I think that’s more than we can say for ourselves,” you whisper. He shrugs. “And anyway, don’t make fun of them! The carapacians have all been through a very traumatic experience.”

     Davesprite straightens his shoulders. “Oh. Right.”

     “The troops have finally come home,” Nanna murmurs in agreement into her glass. She sets it down with a clink, a sparkling ring of water forming beside her plate. Behind her, a short Dersite runs their dish under the faucet with a clatter, the deep metal sink reverberating. A turtle snaps at their armored ankles to get ahold of the remnants on their plate.

     “Remember to put it in the dishwasher!” Nanna calls over her shoulder.

     The Dersite nods and trots to an industrial-sized dishwasher against the far wall of the kitchen. They ignore the disappointed turtle, tugging the copper door almost to the floor and placing their dish inside the cavernous machine. Nanna leans across the table to whisper to you through the din. “They’re always leaving their dishes on the tables,” she says lowly.

     “I wonder…” you muse. “There used to be a lot of farms all across Skaia. Big ones, too. They grew all sorts of things.” You close your eyes, the surface of the cracked battlefield passing neon-bright behind your eyelids. Half-burned crops litter the monochrome chessboard, little shacks and trailers reduced to shells. “I wonder if they would be interested in going back to rebuild them. To have more space to move around, you know? It’d certainly be better than being cooped up in here.”

     Nanna releases a long exhale, stirring a tiny pudding-sized bowl of soup with her spoon. “I’ll ask after someone in charge, if you’d like to undertake that initiative. I’ll warn you now: I’m not sure you’ll meet with great luck.”

     “’Someone in charge?’”

     “Are you saying these guys are still going around post-session calling themselves ‘Lieutenant’ and sh…stuff?” Davesprite asks, covering his food-stuffed mouth with his hand.

     “Oh, not at all! That’s the _last_ thing the chess folk would want to do,” Nanna says. “They happen to be terrifically organized, though. Why, it wasn’t even a month into this journey that a whole string of them started up group therapy sessions.”

     One of your ears swivels forward. “Seriously?”

     “I thought it was sweet.” Nanna taps her spoon against the edge of her bowl. “Helping each other move past the trauma of war, that is. They meet every Tuesday and Thursday in the gymnasium.” She lowers her voice and shakes her head in the way that women in movies do when something is awfully sad and pitiful. “So many of them were soldiers. They’re trying very hard to recover.”

     You look over at Davesprite. He raises his eyebrows. _Get a load of that._

     “So I’ll pass on your idea to them, dear, but I wouldn’t expect them to slobber all over the offer. That planet is so marred by the hand of war that it may upset many of them to return.” Nanna finishes her soup with a delicate sip and places it on top of her empty plate. “It isn’t their home, after all.”

     Your hand twinges. “I know.”

 

     A loud purring echoes under the table, and you squeak when a long pink sprite tail drags across the tops of your feet.

     “Purr purr purr… hello Nanna!” Jaspers pokes his head over the top of the table by Nanna’s stool. Davesprite inhales sharply and clenches his fork. You rest your hand lightly on his forearm.

     “Hello, my sweet boy,” Nanna coos. She scratches him under the oversized chin, and his tentacle whiskers twitch forward in delight. “Have you enjoyed the kibble I alchemized especially for you, kitty?”

     You drag your eyes off of Jaspers to snicker at Nanna’s tone of voice. You lean over towards Davesprite. “Isn’t this a grandma stereotype?” you whisper.

     “All we’re missing on Grandma Bingo is ugly seasonal sweaters,” he whispers back. His mouth tugs into a worried frown.

     “Oh yes, it was very very yummy!” Jaspers mews. His tendril arms curl up at his crisply tailored chest, princess hat wobbling. “It is exactly like what I ate when I lived with Rose! I think….” He blinks his void-black eyes. “I forget!”

     “I’m very glad, then,” Nanna says. She strokes behind his lavender ears.

     His purrs radiate off of him, but swiftly enough he decides the affection is too much and darts underneath the table. You feel an involuntary growl start in your throat.

     “Jade? Are you all right, dear?”

     “Ugh. _Yes_ , Nanna,” you sigh, exasperated at your own instincts. “I promise I’m not mad, I just have this weird thing about cats now that I can’t really control.” You jab a finger at your ears, and Nanna nods in understanding. You can’t wipe the wild look off your face; you can feel how bared your teeth are.

     “We must have all forgotten you were a dog girl among all your other normal human qualities,” Davesprite says through gritted teeth. He means for it to be a joke, but it sounds pained. His eyes keep darting to the table.

     You catch a flash of purple-pink in the darkness under your feet, and the growl waiting in your chest evolves into a snarl. It gurgles in your throat, and despite your embarrassment it doesn’t go away. You imagine yourself tackling Jaspers to the ground and biting his throat with two long canines, which only makes you feel worse. Shame bubbles in your gut. Stupid, stupid space dog powers.

     “Wow, growling like a werewolf while blushing,” Davesprite says with his trembling fists. “This must be what the kids call ‘tsundere.’”

     “Oh, shut up.”

     Jaspers reappears between the two of you. The tip of his hat skims the table ledge. Davesprite yelps and climbs up onto the table, wrapping his sprite tail around him.

     “Mrow mrow. Do you have any leftovers?” he meows innocently.

     You grab the purple fabric of his lapel, which draws a spit and a growl out of him. Jaspers’ ears swivel back as you ball his pinstriped shirt in your fist, pulling him close to your face. Distantly, you hear Nanna scolding you.

     “There’s nothing here for you, but you’ll _become_ leftovers if you don’t clear out,” you hiss into his ear. A low noise rumbles in his throat. “I’d better not catch you bothering Dave either, got it? Keep to your kibble and we won’t have a problem.”

     “ _Hissss_!” Jaspers hisses back. Since he gives nothing but an onamonapia for response, you let go of his shirt with a last push. He grumbles as he snakes along the floor to the safety of the carapacians.

     “Don’t be so cruel to that poor creature!” Nanna exhales when you sit upright again. Davesprite returns tentatively to his spot.

     “Sorry,” you murmur to your fork. “Can’t help it.”

     Davesprite’s hands tremble as he breaks a roll in half. “That cat is gonna come for me someday. My days are numbered, I can feel it.”

     You thwack his arm with the back of your hand. “No, he’s not. I’ve got your back.”

     Nanna shakes her head and smiles. “This is the sort of chaos I miss,” she says fondly. “Although my household in life was never as colorful!”

 

     She turns with her dishes stacked in her hand, dumping them into the sink with a hollow echo. “So, what have you two been up to these past few days?” she asks over her shoulder. Her voiced is raised above the sound of the water.

     “Not much,” Davesprite says between chews. “If you don’t count contemplating the meaning of life while staring at a wall for several hours.”

     “That sounds exciting,” Nanna humors. She carries her dishes to the copper dishwasher, loading everything inside meticulously.

     “Dave thinks he’s halfway to achieving a Zen state,” you add.

     Nanna glances up and looks between the two of you. It occurs to you that she’s never heard you refer to Davesprite without the suffix attached. Your cheeks warm under her stare.

     “Is that so?” she asks finally. “Have you done anything else?”

     The last word has a bite to it. You picture her taking a crowbar to the inside of your mind, prying open the wooden planks to get at what you hide. She’s too tactful to address the elephant in the room. Nanna is still different from what you’ve perceived as the typical mother – you think most others would be shaking Davesprite by the front of his shirt, demanding to know what he’s been doing with her daughter. She didn’t even comment on his sharing your bed.

     The latter makes your cheeks burn hotter. Your living arrangement has become close to normal for you, but dragging the opinion of an outside observer into the equation sways your notion of this as “average,” makes you question whether your coping methods are acceptable after all. You wish you had Rose here to back you up on the psychology of grief. Anything to clear that nearly accusatory look off Nanna’s face.

     Davesprite clears his throat. “Jade’s been teaching me how to shoot, too.” He rolls his shoulder back and pats the skin. “I’m bruisin’ like a summer peach.”

     “Oh, Jade, you shoot?” Nanna pushes her glasses up, the frame chains swaying. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

     You smile at the indirect compliment. The dishwasher door groans with protest when she swings it closed.

     Nanna coasts back to her seat and wipes her damp hand off on a red dishtowel. She swipes it across her end of the table, catching dribbles of water and crumbs in its fabric. “There we go,” she murmurs. She tosses the rag over the arch of one of the sink faucets and exhales quietly when she sits down again.

     You assess each other.

     Nanna looks between you and Davesprite with a sly little smile, her fist balled under her chin like she’s in on a secret and is making you guess what it is.

 

     “Do you know what I just remembered?” Nanna asks. Her tone becomes ten times lighter, and you’re taken by surprise. Her eyes gleam, seeing something far beyond the wall.

     “What?” you try.

     “I was just thinking about what a disaster my wedding day was.”

     Davesprite coughs suddenly, placing a fist over his mouth as his shoulders shake. You slap him hard between the wings, and he clears his throat violently.

     “You okay?” you ask.

     “Yeah,” he rasps. “Went down the wrong pipe.”

     Nanna continues her trip down memory lane uninterrupted. “I was _late_ to my own wedding, can you believe that?”

     You laugh behind your hand. “Really? That’s awful.”

     “The planner was a coworker of mine – the type of woman who gets frazzled if anything is thirty seconds out of schedule. Imagine her distress! If we had had cell phones, everyone’s would be ringing nonstop from the church.”

     “What made you late?”

     “I-5 was backed up for miles. A complete parking lot! Our car was swamped. If I recall correctly, a logging truck had overturned, and the road was blocked with timber! They needed a crew to come clear the logs out from the highway. There must have been dozens of them.” Nanna hoots with laughter. “There was a picture of it in the news that day, I believe. I’m sure I must have kept the clipping, but it’s gone now, of course….”

     Davesprite places his hand over his chest and clears his throat again. You glance over at him and see that his face is bright gold. Nanna notices, too.

     “Feeling embarrassment on my behalf?” she asks with a wink of her slashed eye. “I don’t blame you. I was mortified. There my fiancée was, all suited up and ready to go, and he must have thought I had stood him up!”

     You put your elbow on the table, resting your face in your hand. “Was he mad?”

     “No, no. Just terribly sick with anxiety, was all! Which some might argue is even worse.” Nanna’s shoulders quiver with silent laughter. “It mustn’t have helped that the venue we selected was terribly small. I kept imagining him pacing around Claquato a hundred times over, biting his nails and wondering when we would show up.”

     “Is that a church?” you ask.

     “A very old one. His family had used it since its inception, and because I had no traditional house of worship that my own family had attended, I went along with what he insisted upon.” She curls her finger around a frame chain dangling from her glasses, the blue beads clinking. “My family only really went to church for appearances. The rituals were always lost on me.”

     “I’ve never been to church at all,” you say, shaking your head. You look at Davesprite to see if he’ll weigh in. He stops mid-swig and sets his cup down.

     “You think my bro ever took me to a church? Pff,” he says. “Never saw the inside of one.”

     Nanna nods. “But despite the grievous delay, it didn’t prevent that day from being one of the best in my life. Yes, there were miscommunications, but at the end of the day it all worked out.” She closes her eyes. “In a way it was appropriate that the day didn’t go as planned. A wedding is an event you set up for months, even years! I found it fitting that we had to trudge through those final obstacles, and find a way to make it work regardless. It was a metaphor for our entire relationship, I suppose.”

     Her smile is so sad. You decide to ask another question to lift her spirits.

     “Was the planner okay?”

     Nanna laughs. “We must have shaved several years off of her life, but yes, she was pleased with the final result. Bless her, she nearly wrestled with the minister to force him into extending the allotted time of the ceremony. Otherwise we would have been getting married in the street!”

     You can picture a black and white photograph of a wedding taking place in the middle of a dirt road, a Model T all grainy behind the heads of people in old fashioned tuxedos. It’s hard to imagine a young Nanna. You were never able to recover any photos of her in your grandfather’s study; if you had, they were unlabeled. She must have been lovely in her early adulthood, bright blue eyes sparkling even wider in a younger face.

     “Who’d you get married to, anyway?” Davesprite asks. You’d like to know the answer to that, too. You lean forward, but Nanna waves her hand dismissively and pushes her hair behind her ears.

     “That’s a story for another day,” she sighs. “But now I’ve gotten myself wishing I had some of those photos left! It was a beautiful day that fall. The leaves were just starting to turn.”

     Your stomach flips, and you have a feeling that her wedding photos were not lost due to being left behind on Earth. You’ve caused Nanna to lose more than you initially thought. Acid burns in your throat, and you push your plate forward.

     “However,” Nanna says. “This story _does_ have a moral to it, as all elders are wont to tack onto their reminiscences.” Her hand travels to her collar, and she fidgets with her sprite pendant between her thumb and index. “Sometimes things seem ruined beyond repair, and you think it might be hours before the emergency crew arrives to clear out those pesky logs. But one obstacle doesn’t prevent the entire day from being irredeemable.”

     Davesprite’s jaw flinches. You watch him out of the corner of your eye as his fingers twitch at his gut, wanting to reach out but feeling unable.

     “You’ll roll your eyes at me, but teenagers really do think they know everything,” Nanna continues. “I’ve been around a very long time. Long enough to know that everything has its reason. The truth will present itself to you in time.”

     Your eyes sting, and you blink to keep the tears at bay. You don’t look at Nanna for fear that her expression will push you over the edge, so the three of you sit in silence for what feels like minutes.

     At last, Nanna pushes herself up and offers to take your plate.

     “Are you finished?” she asks softly. You nod without looking at her, and she vanishes from your sight with yours and Davesprite’s dishes.

     “What’d you think of that?” Davesprite whispers out of her earshot. The sink sputters to life, masking your voices.

     You shrug. “Not sure,” you reply, voice cracking. Davesprite sighs and rubs your shoulder wordlessly, and you swipe the tears away with the cuff of your sleeve before they can slide down your cheeks.

     When Nanna seats herself down again, Davesprite surprises you by getting out of his chair and placing a firm hand beside you on the table.

     “Sorry, Nanna, but we have to excuse ourselves. It’s been a long week,” he says.

     Nanna blinks at him, then looks at you, then finally nods.

     “Thanks for the food. We’ll come by again soon.”

     You take the hint and push yourself up. Your feet feel unsteady. Davesprite takes the long sleeve of your shirt between his fingers, so subtly that it has to be invisible past your end of the table. You feel your heart begin to settle, though your eyes still burn.

     “Goodnight, Nanna,” you murmur. “Thanks for dinner.”

     “Goodnight, dear,” Nanna says, voice hushed. It’s almost lost in the sounds of the carapacians still gathered in the kitchen.

     The end of one table bursts into raucous laughter at something a salamander sitting amid their dishes has done, and you flinch at the sudden sound. You follow Davesprite’s lead and turn to leave, walking slowly past rows of Prospitians and Dersites eating amongst each other. Your cheeks redden to know that Nanna must see Davesprite clinging to your sleeve from her perspective.

     You wonder if she was planning to spring the wedding analogy on you all along as some sort of pick-me-up, or whether something she saw tonight really prompted it. You can’t imagine what that might have been.

     The kitchen feels impossibly long. You weave between two columns of cafeteria-style tables, your ears swiveling uncontrollably to pick up the sounds all around you. You can feel the eyes of the Prospitians bore into you, recognition flickering in their faces. But none of them try to pull you into conversation, and you cannot tell whether the Dersites are watching Davesprite with similarly piercing stares.

     You feel your hands go clammy, chills running down your back. Oh, _god_ , what if one of them stops you? What if a Prospitian gets up right now and asks you where John is, where the Prince of Prospit has wandered off to? You watch their faces, searching for the first signs of interrogation. The need to teleport itches at your cells. The Green Sun flickers under your skin, pushing to have its power unleashed. Your breath quickens, and Davesprite catches the look on your face when he glances back at you.

     “Hey, you good?” he asks lowly. You don’t look at him, only scan the crowd and feel your sense of touch go numb. You can no longer tell if he’s still grasping your sleeve.

     “What if they ask?” you whisper. “What if one of them asks?”

     “Asks what?”

     “ _You know what_ ,” you hiss quietly. Davesprite furrows his brow. “What if they ask about John?”

     His name hovers. Davesprite’s throat bobs as he swallows. He starts to pause, but then takes your trembling hand in his and pulls you quickly through the crowd. The air catches in your lungs.

     “No one will be asking you anything.” He says it matter-of-factly.

     You squeeze your eyes shut. You don’t see the swinging doors open to let you out, but you hear the air swish between them as Davesprite pushes them open. You blink your eyes in the hallway, the noise of the kitchen now blanketed and dull. Davesprite releases your hand with fingers that flex. You cover your eyes with your hands, wiping away stinging tears.

     “Thanks,” you gasp. “Sorry. I think I’m developing a phobia of chess people.”

     “Caraphobia, huh.” Davesprite laughs and wipes his mouth with his palm, dragging it down his chin. “Guess we’ll have to embark on a hermitage.”

     You let a long breath rattle out of you, and you imagine your ribcage clanking like piano keys to force the air out.

     “Guess so.” You look at him past your hair, embarrassed, but he doesn’t seemed fazed in the slightest.

     “Signed and initialed, remember?” Davesprite crosses his arms across his chest.

     You nod and smile weakly. “I wouldn’t defy so sacred a document.”

     “I know. Me neither.” He nudges your shoulder with his. “Let’s get the hell out of here already.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha i always had a comparison to thanksgiving in my chapter outline, but definitely did NOT expect to publish this chapter on thanksgiving. im following the homestuck trend of publishing certain things on certain holidays......... anyway, have a good lasaga
> 
> umm, just kidding about last chapter notes. next two chapters will probably be posted around the same time, but thats it lol


	20. Chapter 20

     Jade's hand was tense when you took it up in yours, her fingers squeezing so tightly that she probably didn't even notice. Now you think she’s starting to calm down, if not turning steadily redder with embarrassment. She walks slowly, keeping her eyes downcast, her arms folded tight across her chest. You clear your throat.

     “I’m kinda glad we left when we did. Was startin’ to get some major cafeteria flashbacks.”

     Jade snorts. You’re encouraged by the small smile forming on her face.

     “No, seriously. Kept thinkin’ one of those little chess fuckers was gonna start a food fight. Duck and cover, everyone, here comes an expired carton of strawberry milk at eleven o’clock.”

     Jade blows a strand of hair out of her face and looks at you. Despite her best efforts to pull her hair back before Nanna could yank her into the kitchen, she still looks like she just rolled out of bed. You pat the back of your head, suddenly self-conscious of your own appearance.

     “Do you want to know something Nanna told me a while back?”

     “What did Nanna tell you a while back.”

     “She said sprites don’t need to sleep. I thought that was interesting.”

     You chew the inside of your mouth. “I mean, she’s not wrong.”

 

     The corridor splits into two directions. You follow Jade’s lead and trail after her when she turns to the left. At only seven in the evening, all of the ship’s hall lights remain on. The green light that beams in from a porthole window is washed out with fluorescent yellow.

     “Why do you sleep, then?”

     You stare at the ceiling, examining the world map of rusty blotches that streak the bolted panels. “Why wouldn’t I? There’s not a whole lot else to do, is there?”

     “That’s true.”

     “Would you prefer if I lurked in the corner of your bedroom all night? Wake up at three a.m. and see a feathery shadow in the darkness, eyes all glowin’ like a kitty cat’s?”

     Jade barks with laughter. “No, thank you.”

     “It’s too late, Jade. Mothman is here and he’s ready.”

     Jade hides her smile behind her hand. You look at her from the corner of your eye, and a broad grin spreads on your own face.

     “But no, in all seriousness. I guess it just feels nice to do normal human things, like eating and sleeping and stuff. It’s not that hard to like, force my body into doing it. Just makes me feel not as… weird.”

     Jade nods. She squints a little as you pass under a light fixture, her eyes adjusting to the intense brightness. “I just thought I’d ask. It always seemed that you were awake and online no matter what.”

     “Yeah, no, that’s true. My fucked up schedule had benefits, though. Someone was always bound to be online no matter what time it was. One a.m.? Only eight p.m. for Jade. Four a.m.? I’m sure I can catch Rose before she fucks off to go to ‘school’ or whatever.”

     “You’re making up for torturing yourself with sleep deprivation, huh?”

     “Didn’t feel like it at the time, but man, yeah. Dude should have given me a bedtime. Shit.”

     Jade only snickers under her breath in response. In the quiet you start to focus on the itch in your right wing. It’s been recalibrating itself for months now, growing out in awkward tendrils. Right now, it looks like a baby wing compared to the full length of your uninjured one, and the edges of it twinge unbearably. You lift your hand to dig into the feathers.

     “Stop that!” Jade swats your hand off of your wing. “You’ll scratch it raw. Just let it heal.”

     “Come on, I’m dyin’ here.”

     “Hush, Mothman.”

 

     An echo rumbles at the far end of the hall. Like a flock of tropical birds bursting out of the rainforest canopy, or a shitload of gazelles streaking across the savannah, the hallway is suddenly bombarded by a swarm of consorts. They round into the corridor en masse, hundreds of little toes pitter-pattering. They split around the two of you and surge past in an organic stream. A salamander brushes past your tail.

     You tip an invisible cowboy hat. “Whoa there, Bessie.”

     “Gotcha!” Jade chirps. She scoops up an iguana from the herd, holds it close and nuzzles her face in its tiny blue body.

     “Congratulations, it’s a boy.”

     Jade ignores you. She bops the consort on its nose with her finger. It makes a noise in its throat and pops a green bubble, trying to find footing below its webbed toes.

     “Man, I wish my consorts had that much cute-factor. Nakodiles are annoying as all hell.”

     “No, not even! You just have to give them a chance.”

     “Nah. Gave ‘em plenty of chances. They’re lost causes. If I had a boonie for every one of those bastards I nearly strangled in-session….”

     Both Jade and the iguana give you a harsh look.

     “Dave!”

     “Just sayin’.”

     “Well, _I_ think the iguanas are sweet. Don’t I?” she coos to the consort in her arms. It makes a gurgling sound and wags its little tail.

     You smirk, pulling your phone out slowly and trying to open the camera app as sneakily as you can. You get a pretty good frame of Jade holding the iguana close to her chest, but at the last second she holds the thing up and uses it as a living shield to block her face. Your camera flashes a little too late.

     “When are you going to learn that you simply cannot take a candid photo of me?” Jade scolds.

     “I can try.”

     “You’re fighting a losing battle,” she says. The iguana squalls in protest as the last of the horde disappears. Jade sets it down, and it waddles off with stumpy legs.

     “Live to fight another day, I guess.”

     Your phone is almost full of boredom photos. It’s about time for you to dump them all onto your computer, filing them away in a folder titled “Miserable Dead-End Skaia Adventure 2: Electric Boogaloo.” Phone-quality photos aren’t really up to your personal standard, but using one of your nicer cameras would require the dark room in your closet. So, no fancy pictures for you. Instead they’re tinged with pixel grain and motion blur, all squawking consorts and swaying LOFAF treetops and the cloud of Jade’s hair as she pulls it forward to mask her face.

 

     Jade turns into a familiar corridor, and your arms brush as you walk side by side. You’re getting closer to the room now. A while back you would have been a living caution sign, grossing her out with your nerves and your clammy hands. But now the contact feels normal… _right_. So you don’t break into panicked hives as you lean into each other. Not even close. Instead you think on the meal you just escaped from, letting your train of thought trail to the carapacians.

     How many of them must you have seen littered across the battlefield? Sitting among them tonight was like landing in Valhalla among the souls of the dead, all those armored corpses that were strewn carelessly across the chessboard. Some of them were nearly camouflaged, inhumanly bent Dersites sticking out from the black plots of the field only due to their bright tunics and the blood that leaked from their exoskeletons. You still don’t know what it was that nagged at your brainstem in those last hours, pushing you like a moth to that bright blue beacon in the sky. The window of time before you ended up here feels unreal.

 

     Jade fiddles with the squeaky handle on the door. The hinges whine as she persuades it open. You stand behind her in the hall, blinking at the darkness within. It’s pitch black. Nothing is recognizable past the dim light that washes in past your shadows. Did you really spend all day in here? When was the last time you even left?

     You stop Jade as she starts to walk in. She turns over her shoulder, glancing at your fingertips that rest there.

     “Dave?”

     “Hey, uh. I have a strange request.”

     “What is it?”

     “Do you think we could go to Skaia?"

     Jade blinks, her eyebrows knitting together. “Why?”

     You didn’t think far enough ahead to invent an explanation.

     “Uh, call it the sudden spirit of adventure sweeping me off my feet, I guess. Being back there kind of got me thinking about stuff.”

     Jade stares. You assume she’s expecting you to elaborate, so you babble on.

     “I guess I just want to reassess some memories? Make sense of all the shit that happened back there. I don’t know. Also, we haven’t teleported anywhere else but to your planet, for Christ’s sake.”

     Her ear flicks, and you exhale when she cracks into laughter. “Is LOFAF losing its appeal already?”

     “Nah. Shit would attract tourists like a fuckin’ flytrap. Just wanna stretch my wings out in new pastures, y’know?”

     Jade considers this. Her eyes dart to the porthole behind you, then finally she nods.

     “Will you be all right?”

     You swallow. “Maybe. I’ll know when I get there.”

     Jade’s eyes flash. Her voice falls to a hush, and you start when her fingers lace into yours.

     “Breathe in, then.”

 

     You fill your lungs with air, and in the next second you feel the pixels of your being light up with the blinding fire of the Green Sun.

           

 


	21. Chapter 21

     The chill sweeps over your skin when the electric warmth of teleportation fades, leaving goosebumps in its wake. You shiver, hold your forearms tightly. The Green Sun prickles.

     Skaia revolves slowly in the center of your makeshift solar system, its battlefield cold and dead. The light that filters into your bedroom saves the planet from total darkness – instead, the chessboard horizon seems shrouded in gray fog. Like the remnants of a tropical storm, the cold mist beginning to stew after the worst of it settles. You can hardly discern anything past the stratosphere.

 

     You gaze up into the marbled sky. Davesprite’s breath is shallow beside you, but you scarcely register him. The color here has all but fled. Only flecks of violet and gold interrupt the vastness of the monochrome, the black and white and gray that threatens to make you lose your bearings in its unending absence of life. For a moment you stagger, feel your knees buckle in the middle of the field. “Purgatory” comes to mind.

     This planet has withered, retreated into itself, and the shimmering sentient heaven of your childhood dreams no longer exists.

     What you stand on isn’t Skaia – not really. Rather, it’s what’s left of its solid core. The battered meteor that remains is unfit to bear the name of what once enveloped it, but a lump forms in your throat to acknowledge it with words. Something feels hollowed out of you, scooped out and left bare like the battlefield itself.

 

     You remember the mythological power that Skaia had when you were very small. It was one of the White Queen’s first warnings to you as a dreamer, and one of the only times she took a dire tone with you: don’t go outside during the eclipse.

     In a foggy memory, you are in the middle of the golden throne room, and everything is very, very tall. The domed ceiling with its ivory inlays seems infinitely far above you. The Queen has you on her lap. She draws your chin toward her to sway your attention from the hulking guard that stands in one of the four archways, his jointed fingers flexing on his staff. You gaze up into her face with wonder, at this being who is as blinding as the blank canvas before the watercolor. The sharp edges of her crown glint in the sunlight that coasts in through the open windows.

     “I want you to promise me that you will never step outside of your bedroom when the moon eclipses Skaia. Do you understand?” she says. Her black eyes glitter, and although you _don’t_ understand, you nod fervently. She runs her porcelain fingers through your hair, affectionate. It leaves a cool, pleasant tingle across your forehead.

     You are not even sure what an eclipse is, but shortly you will find that it’s what happens when the globe of your dream tower skims the brilliant surface of Skaia’s clouds. You have to hold your breath, lest the weight of the air that carries all creative potential fill your lungs and overload you with visions of the past and future. The air is charged, makes your skin feel fuzzy. You got the impression that if you stepped outside the window, the unknowable power of Skaia’s towering cumuli would swallow you whole and eat you alive, dispensing you in whatever vision it had arbitrarily plucked from the timeline.

     Your fingers hovered at the sill, all of time unraveling before you, and you wished with a burning ache that the boy in the other tower could be here to watch it with you.

     It never occurred to you to wonder what lie in the core of Skaia’s vast consciousness. Perhaps you thought that no life could really _survive_ down there, that talk of “the war” was all theory because surely no one could venture past the clouds. When Prospit began to crumble and bits of cathedral towers had snapped off to fall into Skaia’s atmosphere, you were sure that the blinding brightness would strip away at you and leave nothing left. But he was so close, close enough to touch, and in your desperate need to save your brother, to keep him from falling into one of those sentient clouds of your childhood fears, you kept soaring with the roar of inferno burning in your ears.

 

     “This place feels _wrong_ ,” you whisper at last. As if in response, the gray sky seems to churn. A shudder ripples through your spine and dissolves into a prickling in your legs.

     “Was it the Silent Hill fog or the corpses that gave it away?” Davesprite asks. It doesn’t sound sarcastic. His face is pulled into a tight grimace.

     Bile rises in your throat. You hadn’t even noticed the bodies – they blended into the field, looking like the colorless rubble of meteor impacts and destroyed fortresses. You can see now how many there are. There is no pattern, no rhyme or reason to the trails of corpses that rot in the stagnant battlefield. They’re just… everywhere.

     “Does it seem worse than you remember?” you rasp.

     Davesprite fluffs his wings in a way that most people would shake their hands out. He doesn’t respond for a while. Your gaze travels to a half-collapsed Prospitian castle, its turrets caving in on themselves like dominoes.

     “I seem to remember it being a lot more colorful,” he says finally.

     You nod and look away.

 

     The streams of lava that coursed through the battlefield’s fissures have cooled, leaving dull, smoky trails through the earth. No longer does the planet steam with the fresh fallout of fiery impact, though a twinge of the acrid smell remains. It stews in your nostrils like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. Few trees remain standing from the earthquakes that shuddered through Skaia’s crust, but a dense forest of towering pines still populates the horizon. Far beyond it on a sloping hill, you see the towers of a gleaming ivory palace still intact.

     “Walk with me,” you murmur.

     Davesprite floats closely beside you, and with shaking first steps, you begin to stumble down the checkered hillside.

 

     A cold feeling radiates in your chest and arms as you cross the first plain of the battlefield. Despite yourself you let your eyes fall on all the broken bodies, the discarded swords and battered banners hanging limp from their poles. If you had only paid attention when you let your eyes skim across the surface, you would not have suggested to Nanna that anyone come back here. You hope she hasn’t already passed on your offer. They would think you so _crass_.

     Even if you buried the hundreds of dead right now – it would be so easy – the deep bloodstains would still be left behind.

     The two of you pass through the massive shadow of a crashed Dersite hull. It lies on its side, the portholes of its towers all smashed out. The bottom of the battleship is stained with dark earth, violet steel peeling open from what was probably an explosion in the boiler room. The inside of it is pitch black. You stare inside, see with the side of you that is First Guardian how the purple corridors barely differ from the ones you just came from. Inside the living quarters, bedframes have fallen to block the doors. Lavender bedsheets lie crumpled in disarray. Something mechanical inside of the hull groans weakly, perhaps the weight of it still settling in its beached position. You shiver and keep going.

 

     “What are you thinking about?” Davesprite asks. You finish walking the length of the Dersite battleship, and the shadows disappear from his face. He looks at you with quiet concern, and you cannot differentiate it from the gaze he gave the field of corpses.

     “Do you feel as though you’ve lost your family?” you whisper.

     “Literally, or figuratively?”

     You shake your head. “I mean… when I was very small, I couldn’t tell how Prospit was different from my own home. I lived there and explored the city as much as my house. Maybe more. Its people were my people. I felt like one of them.” You flex your fingers in front of you, and they involuntarily gleam with outlines of green.

     You can recall sitting on a bridge over the deep underbelly of the moon, examining your hands and palms and wondering why it was that they were so soft, so unlike the hands that waved to you and held you and brushed your hair lovingly each day. Why all of your friends shimmered in their natural armor, and you were so vulnerable, so breakable.

     “I couldn’t reconnect with them even if I wanted to,” you breathe. “We don’t understand each other anymore.”

     Davesprite lets a breath out through his nose and rubs his bare arms, a shiver passing through him.

     “I think that what I’m feeling is a little different.”

 

     The ground becomes uneven, broken up by the trails of meteors as they stripped away the earth in their paths. The chunks of battlefield are like solid marble, crumbling away to disturb the pattern of the chessboard. You nearly stumble on the rocky rubble, so you decide to float with your feet inches above the ground as Davesprite does. You’ve hardly ever utilized this portion of your god tier powers, and it makes your heart flutter with anxiety. Perhaps it’s the physicist in you that makes you certain that gravity will wreak its revenge and pull you down again.

     Davesprite notices you levitating, and you think he looks a little surprised. It’s only a hunch, but you’ve been suspicious for a while that he floats just high enough above you to ensure that you remain shorter than him. Now you’re equal in height.

     “What?”

     “Hm? Oh.” He shrugs. “I was just thinking that I think I’ve been here before.”

     “How can you tell?”

     Davesprite points toward one o’clock, and your eyes follow the trajectory of his talon. A deep crater remains in the earth from where something massive was plucked from the battlefield. Spindly trees have collapsed in its wake from where it shook the crust.

     “Recognize that?”

     “Not really.”

     “That’s where the battleship used to be.” You stop abruptly when he pauses to stare. He drags his eyes from the gaping depression after a moment, and when his eyes fall on you it makes your shoulders twinge. “This is where you ascended.”

 

     You look down at yourself and try to see whatever it is that has inspired the intense look on Davesprite’s face. Nothing about you feels any different. Your added features don’t feel new anymore; you cannot imagine what it was like not to have all of the Green Sun’s domain available to your eyes and hands. You were not reborn when you sparkled to life on Skaia’s battlefield – you just realized your full potential. You became complete, and the partial remains of you in that past life hardly seem real. What was it like to be fully human? You can’t answer that question.

     It’s been said that the human body has engineered itself to immediately forget the pain of childbirth once the child has been born, an evolutionary tactic to prevent ill will against helpless offspring. Similarly, you have lost the ability to describe how it felt to subsume your dreaming body, to stuff her inside of yourself and devour the unhewn energy that she was not capable of utilizing. Jadesprite could not fathom the burning brilliancy of the Sun, she could not tap into the fire that festered behind her eyes in a way that was as painful to her as it was exhilarating to you. Jadesprite lives inside of you still, but you have chiseled away at her life and her memories until she’s contorted into what you desire of her – silence.

 

     “You never answered me, by the way,” Davesprite says.

     “What are you talking about?”

     He clears his throat, and by the way he bobs you imagine him shifting his invisible feet. “You never told me whether you remember her.”

     “That feels like forever ago.” A slow exhale escapes through your teeth. “I didn’t, didn’t I?”

     His eyebrows raise, expectant.

 

     Jadesprite was uncanny to behold, even coming from your experience of having lived with a literal corpse of yourself. How else should you have reacted to a mirror reflection of yourself, all body horror and animal parts? The feeling that washed over you was not so much guilt as repulsion.

     She was a loose cannon, a loaded machine gun ready to go off with an explosion of unrefined First Guardian might. Which she did, of course. If you remember anything of your brief interaction with Jadesprite, it was how her tracks of tears flickered like neon, the gentle quiver of her lower lip. It made your cheeks ruddy with shame. When you cry now, you remember those gleaming chartreuse tears. You feel the acid bubble in your gut, and something deep in your core repels against you.

     You figure she never even tried to do the one thing you asked of her. If fighting Jack Noir was too much for her to handle, it would have been nice of her to help you track down the final frogs. Breeding the Genesis Frog would have gone so much more quickly with her assistance. But she didn’t come with a sprite pendant, and you didn’t want to talk to her anyway, so you trudged through the game without your spirit guide. As if she knew Jadesprite was no longer with you, Echidna imparted upon you perhaps everything her pre-downloaded knowledge could have given you through barks and sobs.

     “Don’t feel bad about it,” Dave assured you. “Mine fucked off, too. God only knows where he’s makin’ his nest now.”

     It occurred to you later that Dave saw Jadesprite get prototyped in the first place, and you wondered how much of your altercation he stuck around to watch on his screen.

     Either way, you didn’t feel like you were missing out on much. You pulled yourself up by the sneaker laces and continued on without her.

 

     “Jade?”

     You jump. “I’m still thinking about it. I… it’s sort of painful to remember.”

     His eyebrow flinches. “How come?”

     Davesprite’s look bores into you. You look away to escape. “It hurt me to consider that I could ever end up in her position. I mean, how could I ever let myself fall so low? How could I give up so easily?” You squeeze your eyes shut and pinch the bridge of your nose. “She didn’t even remember anything I was still trying to achieve. She couldn’t remember what it was like to _try_.”

     There is an intrusive voice in the back of your mind that reminds you of your own pain, of the full weight of the doomed timeline clinging to your ankles and dragging you down its narrow path. _Neither do you_ , it says. _Neither do you._ You are talking to a mirror. Jadesprite has weaseled her way into you somehow, taking the foothold of your despair and burrowing deep. You are everything you hate.

     “I never wanted to be like her,” you finish. A lump solidifies in your throat, and you force it down. “But I guess it already happened.”

     Davesprite looks down. His sprite tail flicks across the dirt, twitching capriciously like the tendrils of a kite.

     “I think she might have been the only one who got what I was going through,” he says at last. “Being a sprite is weird. I can’t… you can’t explain it to someone who’s never been prototyped. And like, not just _any_ sprite would get it, you know? Your Nanna wouldn’t get it. Jaspers wouldn’t get it.”

     You rub your arms, uncomfortable.

     “It’s like you surrender yourself completely to the, like… _raw_ power of the kernelsprite. And that’s only if you prototype yourself willingly.”

     Guilt pokes into your chest.

     “Your head is flooded with all these millions of facts that any SBURB player would probably kill gladiator-style to have. The programming tries to fuck with your personality, too. It makes you want to be all cagey and shit, just to make it harder for whoever you’re serving.” Davesprite’s mouth pulls into a sneer, a few white teeth visible.

     “It’s like those documentaries that try to explain the science behind Star Trek, y’know? How if you actually got ‘beamed up,’ all your atoms would have to be reorganized exactly as they were before. It’s like that. You fall into the kernel and hope that everything about you is still intact when you emerge on the other side.

     “But that’s not even all of it. Being a sprite is being a servant. But I didn’t jive that way, you know?” Davesprite’s hands are alive, gesticulating wildly. You shrink into yourself. “I wanted to _do_ something, and the game pushes against that. It was a miracle I was able to finish LOHAC’s quest by myself. Hephaestus let me, but only as a technicality. That’s how you exist when you’re a sprite of yourself. You’re a technicality. You’re the dweeb at the front of the club who the bouncer lets in just because you’re with your friends. But you can tell he’d throw your ass to the curb if he could.”

     You stare at your hovering feet.

     “So you haven’t really answered my question,” he sighs. He breathes a little quicker, as if talking so fast took the air from him. “You’ve told me how you felt about her, but not about _being_ her. I wanna know if you have any of her memories.”

     You shake your head, starting to open your mouth but then saying nothing. With your eyes cast down, you can see his knuckles flexing nervously.

     “It might help, you know? It might help you… cope. If you knew how she dealt with her own grief.”

     “I….”

     “Please, Jade. I need to know if you still understand what it’s like.”

 

     Your cheeks warm simply to remember what it was like to bear witness to the disaster of Jadesprite, and it feels an impossible task to burrow into yourself and spin the mirror the other way. To see your own face through her perpetually tear-glazed eyes, to feel the itch of her glowing tear tracts. But the desire to be understood casts a shadow over Davesprite’s features. He looks pleading.

     So you clasp your hands together, stare into the water, and dive into the depths of yourself.

 

     The inside of you is empty and bursting all at once. It is partly a black hole, voraciously roping all available light into its maw, partly a supergalaxy engorged with stars. It is black and green and hemorrhaging with the mass of the universe contained within, stuck in a slow-motion supernova. There are pops of abstract color here, oscillating in bursts of images and sound. You delve deep into the core of the flickering lights, strip away the color until you arrive at that blinding Thing that resides in the heart of you. And through the flaring layers of Green Sun you are able to peel back the folds, tunnel further inside the womb to where the cells of fauna mutate into binary code in a sudden burst of nuclear fission. You fall into yourself, feel yourself become weightless. The surface of your brain goes muddy with static and code, and finally, _finally_ , like being born again, you emerge on the other side.

 

     This memory is a hazy one, the outlines fuzzed with motion blur. But you feel it clearly, and it pulsates under your eyelids. Half of you has ceased to be – you are utterly without weight, suspended in a permanent aerial dance due to the repossession of your legs. But the Green Sun roasts you alive from within, and you wondered previously with a surge of panic if what was escaping from your eyes was really neon blood. The joy of your freedom of movement is hampered by the sour chemical burn that lives inside your optic nerves and sets your mind aflame with absolute _anguish_.

     You don’t remember how you got here or what drew you to the surface of Skaia’s broken battlefield. You _do_ remember the sting of rejection, of being cast from your home as quickly as you were yanked by your hair from the afterlife. The memories of your past life had just bubbled to the surface with the sight of your grandfather’s laboratory, but you are not welcome there anymore. If anything, you are certain of that. There is something you are supposed to be doing, but you don’t know what that is. And you would be tearing your hair out in tufts trying to figure it out, if it were not for the fact that you are not alone.

     Davesprite is whispering something lowly to you – but he’s not Davesprite, because he’s just Dave, because _you’re_ just Jade, aren’t you? You think so. Or maybe not? You were crying so hard before. You were lost and alone and the Sun hurt so so badly and there was a part of you that wanted to tear yourself in half, to explode the kernel and return to where it was soft and quiet. But there was something – something! – you were supposed to be doing. You have forgotten what that was.

     Davesprite is whispering something, yes, very quietly, and his rough hands barely brush your arms. He’s cautious of you, aware of the living migraine that radiates off of you in every solar flare you see behind your eyes. You do not shrink away, wiping the itching streaks of glowstick tears from your cheeks. You think he needs more comfort than you do. He’s shredded to bits, and as you nod at his words you can see golden blood dripping onto the chessboard. What is he saying? His voice is so low. Your ears perk to hear.

     Something about the Reckoning. Oh god, oh no, oh _yes_ , the Reckoning! How could you have forgotten? You are forgetting _everything_! Stupid, stupid! Meteors are whirling past you like hail now. You realize that it is not Davesprite’s voice that is so low – you just can’t hear him over the explosions of the impacts. He holds your arms firmly. You look him in the face, an exhale escaping your fangs.

     “We are going to be okay,” he says. You think? You think. “Do you believe me?”

     Do you believe him. Do you? Davesprite’s chest is smeared with yellow gore, skewered like livestock, and he is telling _you_ you’ll be okay? Priorities, priorities. Didn’t Jade scold you for that? You think she did. Your priorities are all messed up. Davesprite keeps bleeding, and he asks again. His words echo. A meteor crashes, wipes out a patch of trees. Do you believe me?

     You are the only two people left for miles, maybe the whole planet. Two half-humans. A giggle erupts below the surface. Together you make one, incomplete, scarred and undead human – but one hundred percent human nonetheless. Do you believe me?

     You feel yourself nodding. “I believe you.” Your voice is distant.

     “We’re going to be okay.”

     Are we?

     Another meteor lands, and Davesprite’s silhouette goes black from the glare of the fire. You let him hold onto you in that moment, even though his torso is gouged through and it must badly pain him to have your weightless weight against his skin. You are going to be okay. Everything will be okay.

     You fall into yourself.

 

     “Hey, are you listening? Earth to Jade,” Davesprite says. You yelp at the sound of his fingers snapping in front of your face. He recoils.

     “Shit, did I scare you? Sorry.”

     “No, you’re. It’s fine.” Your words echo inside your head, and it feels like you’re not the one saying them. You hover just outside the borders of your body.

     “Are you all right?”

     Your legs are cold. You push your bangs back. “Am I… yes, I’m okay. I think? I think.”

     “You sound kinda funny. Do you need to go back?”

     “No, I don’t think so.”

     Davesprite’s hands flutter to your arms, barely touching you. Your nerves light up at the contact, and for a moment you think you see meteor trails still smoking. Blobs of iridescent color stain your line of sight. Even when his hands pull away you can feel the phantom weight of his fingers.

     You hear a low whisper, a promise that Skaia won’t be taking you alive today, and you are certain Davesprite understands the look that must be crashing across your face. A vast warmth sideswipes you. The love that pushes down on your lungs almost draws a gasp from you, and when you start to open your mouth, nothing comes out.

     “Do you remember being her?”

     The missing name hovers between you.

     Your chin bobs in a quiet nod, and relief explodes across him. His shoulders relax, the long primaries of his wing spread out, and you think he’ll cry. But then the full force of his sigh escapes him and he ravels himself back up again.

     “Are you sure you’re all right?”

     As your consciousness settles back in, reoccupying the static cells, your body feels impossibly heavy. Your feet touch the ground again, no longer capable of maintaining the delicacy of floating.

     “I feel very… vulnerable.”

     It’s the only word you can think of. Becoming Jadesprite tore away the uppermost layers of your defenses, leaving you blistered and exposed. You wait for the scab to reform and callous.

     Davesprite shrugs. “Sometimes it’s not all that bad to be vulnerable. You kinda figure out who your friends are that way.”

 

     This must make you very morbid, the vibrancy of the affection you feel amidst fragmented war vessels and mangled chess corpses. You’re deliriously happy, a new burst of buttery, warm color among the monochrome.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oooone more chapter in this lil segment. the silent hill 2 ost was basically my soundtrack to writing this lmao.
> 
> hey, im a little worried that the end here is confusing. jade is still jade, ok? she didnt animorph into jadesprite, lol.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whats up im pulling an all nighter and im procrastinating on my paper by posting this!!! hopefully its fully proofread lmao (its probably not just spritz me with water if u find any mistypings)
> 
> anyway im thinkin about goin back retroactively and adding 1-2 illustrations between chapters 4-12 because?? thats a long stretch of pages without pictures?? i dont have anything in mind tho so if u have something in that span youd like to see.... hmu. anyway my hands are shaking time to finish my work. after finals ill have sooo many chapters to write.

     For the last time today – probably ever – you have an important job to do. And you’ll do it, _eventually_. It’s a straight shot to LOFAF, maybe twenty minutes if you huff and puff and fluff your wing out. You have some time left before it’s all over, though, so it’s not like you have to haul ass.

     Your quest is complete, the Deringer is finished, and you haven’t collapsed from blood loss yet. Just gotta tote the sword off to its new owner. Last you heard, Dave is on LOFAF. You considered pestering him before showing up so that you’d know where to go. But if you did, Jade might tag along. You’re not sure you want to deal with that. Instead, you’ll leave it somewhere by her house and tell him to go collect it once you’re already back in the Medium. You won’t need to talk to either of ‘em.

     As far as SBURB is concerned, your gig is nearly over. What will be your use after this? What will become of you?

     Like you said: you’ll do it eventually.

 

     Hephaestus threw you out of his lair with undisguised urgency, a PTA mom shoving her slacker son out the door because I swear to _god,_ if you miss that bus one more time you will be in for it. You felt impossibly small under his gaze, bright white coal in that shifting, molten skin. It’s like he was made of tectonic plates, and the surface of his basalt body churned to reveal fiery glints of red and gold. Unbearable heat rolled off every inch of him. You had a bit of trouble understanding him this time around – maybe the game was indecisive about whether or not he’s still _your_ denizen. Unlike your own timeline, Hephaestus has a voice like his mouth is full of rocks, grinding away to make his words clunky and guttural. Not that he had the voice of an angel to begin with.

     You had just fled the atmosphere of LOHAC, and with your ascent from the planet came the relief of the Medium’s cool vacuum. It made you a little less woozy to be free of that bubble of humidity-heavy air. You took a deep breath, spreading out your one wing splattered with the blood of the other. Your palms weren’t so sweaty, the sword in your hand a little lighter. LOFAF shone in the distance, shimmering green and blue. You felt weightless.

     Skaia glowed just as strongly even through your shades. Its white halo swirled and sparkled, and you couldn’t seem to shove it from your periphery. It just stayed there, inviting and divine and so, so _blue_. LOFAF was dull in comparison. You stopped flying, let yourself hang between Point A and Point B to stare the glittering entity straight on. Had you ever visited Skaia in your old timeline? No, you don’t think you did – too close to Prospit for your comfort. What harm could it do to see for yourself what all the fuss was about? Hephaestus _who_?

     So, you took a detour.

     It was a slow descent into Skaia, its atmosphere thick and yielding like warm water. The clouds didn’t show much of anything anymore – sometimes you saw a glance of a LOLAR waterfall, a spouting lava geyser on LOFAF, a glimpse of your own denizen from the near past, hammering away to forge to the Deringer as you shrink away, clutching your bloody sides. It didn’t feel like you were flying down to the surface of the battlefield, or that you were floating at all. You were _sinking_. You wondered fleetingly if you’d be able to get back out. But all too soon the air relented and you were below the clouds, hazy and white above your head.

 

     They say that car accidents sometimes cause more accidents because everyone tears their eyes from the road to watch the aftermath, to crane their necks and see if they can spot a body in the back of the ambulance. You feel this might happen to you, too. You can’t bring yourself to look away from all their broken faces, their chess bodies smashed open and scattered on the field. The image of a cooked crab comes to mind – those legs splintering off with visceral cracks.

     The longer you’re here, the more you’re compelled to stay. Your stomach is a leaden weight that you don’t think would allow you to fly away from this place.

     Some of the chess people are massive. Their deformed muscles and bulbous heads make them resemble the white rubble of the broken battlefield. Others are inhuman, massive horses with their armored legs splayed. Don’t they call those things “Knights” in chess? But what gets you are those little pawns, fragile and childlike. Their beetle eyes stare at the sky.

     There’s a flash on the horizon, a sound like a whistle, and the earth trembles with the impact of a meteor. You lift your eyes, flex your fingers on the Deringer’s hilt. The Reckoning is here, and you feel no more inclined to flee.

 

 

     Are Jade’s hands shaking, or are you imagining it? You have to slow to match her halting, uneven pace. It’s an effort not to reach out and drape your arm around her, to draw her toward you so her shoulders will relax. You don’t want to freak her out.

     Meteors have riddled this part of the battlefield to bits, and the black and white soil has crumbled into an indistinct gray. You crinkle your nose at the lingering, sharp smell.

     “It was very loud, wasn’t it?” She’s quiet as ever, just above a mumble.

     “What?”

     “The Reckoning. I couldn’t hear myself think.”

     Your heart jumps. “Yeah.”

     Jade steps over a marble hunk of debris. She starts to wobble, her footing unsure on the craggy rock. You reach out and clasp her upper arm in your hand, and her fingernails dig into your shoulder blade.

     “Sorry,” she murmurs.

     “Forget how to walk?”

     She lets go of you. “Guess so.”

     After a moment, you remember to drop her arm. Jade turns her face away too slowly to hide the small smile on her face. A warm shock of color trails up your skin.

 

     Jade has been a little absent for a while, like her full awareness is checked out for the day. This is probably what it feels like to work at a nursing home, you think. For as much as this unsettles you, however, you feel an equal weight of relief that makes you buoyant.

     She remembers, she _remembers_.

     You were so certain that Jadesprite was irretrievably buried, that the last person who could come close to understanding how you feel was made piecemeal. And if she wasn’t, if some small spark remained, that Jade had smothered her so tightly nothing would be able to reach the surface. You think that would have been worse.

     You had nothing to worry about. You are not alone.

     You can see the same look on her face, the expression Jadesprite adopted once her tears were swiped from her cheeks. Part concern, part humility, maybe even part disgust at the pathetic, bloody sight of you. It lingers on Jade’s face now, and it’s what keeps you from smiling openly. Just in case she’ll think you’re being weird. But the giddy excitement lives in your chest and in the tips of your fingers, and it’s all you can do not to start yelling like a damn goat. You want to shake her shoulders in your enthusiasm, hug the air out of her and swing her in a circle. So, naturally, all you do instead is steal glances of her worried face out of the corner of your eye.

     “Are you _sure_ you don’t want to go back?”

     She nods, curls bouncing.

     “She has… nearly thirteen years worth of memories. I’m trying to file them away… make sense of them.” The corners of her mouth tug downward. “I’m just… waiting.”

     “For what.”

     Her hands flex at her sides. “For my mind to get used to my body again, I guess.”

     “You astral projecting on me, Jade? So not cool. Don’t reach nirvana and leave me hangin’ here.”

     “No, I mean, I think I really _did_ forget how to walk for a while. My legs feel glued on.”

     Your sprite tail curls involuntarily. “I get what you mean. I get, like, the ghost sensation of them all the time.”

     “Yeah.”

     “Hey, if you can’t walk, we can make a little raft out of wood and I’ll push you along in it like a li’l trolley.” You point ahead at the line of a nearby forest, tall pines grasping at the sky. “You’re the wilderness survival expert, right?”

     “Thanks, but no thanks.” Jade wavers a bit, then holds her arms out to balance her steps. She half-leaps over a dark trail where a meteor landed. “I don’t think we need to kill any more trees.”

     “Hippie.”

 

     A Prospitian war plane yards away croaks from within. Its gold steel is dented and busted open, one of its wings buried in the ground. You squint at the scratched logo painted on its underbelly, starting to push up your sunglasses before you remember you’re not wearing them. You nudge Jade in the arm.

     “Where do you think they made this shit?”

     She shrugs. “Probably in the Veil. The moons are too packed to accommodate factories.”

     “Do you think they have, like, a chess people military-industrial complex? Chess capitalism?”

     “What?”

     “Nevermind. Talkin’ to myself.”

 

     The field yields to forest, and the temperature seems to drop several degrees. It’s just as silent in here as the open battleground, not even a chess squirrel yammering away in the branches. The two of you shrink under the towering, crooked trees that didn’t succumb to the Reckoning. Some of them have loose and gnarled roots, one good breeze away from toppling over. The end of your tail disappears in the cold mist.

     “This place’s got no ambiance. Aren’t forests supposed to have, I don’t know, _sound_.”

     Jade pulls her sleeves over her hands, but doesn’t say anything.

     “I’ve never been in a forest before,” you try again. “Like, other than your planet, I mean. I think I can count the times I left the city on one hand.”

     You vaguely remember a summer when you were eight or nine. Your bro went out on a road trip to Arizona with a couple guys you never learned the names of. You were okay with it, though – he left the cabinets stocked with Doritos, so you were pretty jazzed. No real use for a car when you live downtown, either, so wherever you went depended on the bus route. It wasn’t until you were _maybe_ seven that you even started to think about the world outside of Houston.

     “Me neither,” Jade says. Pinpricks of light shine through a patch of branches, and her face is freckled with them. “My island used to be a jungle, but by the time I lived there, it was already chopped down. There was something like underbrush, but….”

     “Bushes don’t really count as trees, man.”

     “So I guess you could say I’d never seen a proper tree until I entered the game!” Jade’s eyes go wide, and your chest deflates with relief. Her step bobs a bit, and for a moment there’s a trace of that same lively, ever-curious girl. The last clouds of her dissociation fall away, the full weight of her being clicking into place, and she is wholly Jade once again. Thank god.

     “Yeah, but the trees on LOFAF are kinda weird. _This_ is a proper forest.” You gesture at the coating of pine needles across the forest floor, mottling the checkerboard. “This is the kinda shit Mom and Dad take you camping in.”

     “Are most camping grounds like this?” Jade’s voice drops. She draws closer to you, pointing to something in the dark of the trees. You squint to see what it is. “Look.”

     Not even the woods were a safe haven. The chess folk who fled into the trees were slaughtered, too. A mangled arm missing its body disappears in shadow as quickly as you notice it.

     “I can’t leave them all out here,” she whispers. Her voice feels inches from your ear, but you stare straight ahead. “It wouldn’t be right.”

     Your Adam’s apple bobs painfully as you swallow. “No, I guess it wouldn’t.”

     “Some other time, then.”

     “Some other time.”

 

     The trees pan out, relinquishing their claustrophobic clustering. You don’t think this is the end of the forest, though. At least, it wasn’t where the forest ended before. This place might have stretched on for untold miles, but your wilderness stroll is abruptly halted by the rocky cliff that the forest drops off into. You lurch back. A loose bit of white marble breaks off of the precipice and falls away.

     “Where are we?”

     Jade steps out of the forest’s shadow.

     “We’ve reached the end of the world.”

 

     Stretching far and wide across the horizon is a massive crater, hollowed out to reveal the battlefield’s crust. Uneven chunks of the field have broken off to hang within its gravitational field – little asteroids frozen in time. A scraggly tree stands on the fragment of rock it occupies, and its roots hang in shreds from the soil. The sharp plummet below you makes your head spin.

     Jade has already strode past you while you had your face down, and you flinch to see her jump from the edge of the rock face. For a moment you think she’s leapt for another purpose, and a shout starts to work its way out of you, but instead she ascends. Jade curls one leg up, landing dramatically on a pedestal of floating battlefield.

     “Mind the gap,” she teases. And then she’s up, up, and away.

     You beat your wings – a little ineffectively given their uneven span – and launch after her.

 

     A platform of chessboard bobs when Jade lands on it. You fold your wings and circle around her, feeling like you’re in some sort of sci-fi film where you have to jump on the right tiles to escape. Red tile, green tile – which one will dump you into the center of the planet?

     “No, seriously,” you pant. Your healing wing smarts from flexing it too quickly. “What happened here?”

     “It was Jack.”

     A taste like metal fills your mouth. “How do you figure.”

     “Because I’ve already seen what’s up _there_ ,” she says simply. She doesn’t point, but you put two and two together just as well. Your gaze follows hers to a broken Prospitian castle in the sky, splintered into pieces.

     “What’s ‘there?’”

     “Follow me.”

     Jade hops to higher ground. You want to hold back – since when have ruined castles ever inspired anything but bad feelings? She keeps getting farther ahead of you, though, and if anything makes you feel _worse_ , it’s letting her fling herself headfirst into this kind of shit. You exhale and unfurl your good wing, feeling the air rush past your feathers as you push yourself in the fortress’ direction. You’ll be sure to save an “I told you so” in case the Creeper shows up.

           

     The totaled castle has been scattered across the sky; you can just barely see a dilapidated drawbridge far from where most of the ruins have frozen in place. Jade coasts up the side of a skeletal keep. Its bricks have fallen away from the foundation to expose what was within, all those frayed remains of whoever occupied it. She perches tentatively on the slick slated floor, mindful of where the marble is beginning to fall away.

     “It’s like a dollhouse,” she says. “You can see all the floors at once like this.”

     “A dollhouse for messed up little kids who take the heads off their Barbies.”

     You look up the stretch of the keep, but you can’t see anything past the third floor. Jade disappears into the shadow of the tower, and you flap your wings to catch up with her.

     It looks like this section housed a library. A long row of mahogany bookshelves have collapsed in a domino effect. Some of the leather-bound volumes remain, scattered across the shelves or laid open on the ground, their pages waving weakly. Most of them probably fell into the crater.

     You weave between gilded columns, thumbing the hairline cracks that have webbed down their lengths. Jade hops up onto a giant stone pedestal. The statue it supported has broken clean off, but it must have been massive. All that remains are huge webbed toes, each as long as your arm. The threadbare carpet underneath it was probably meant to look like a lily pad, but the explosion that tore this tower from the rest of the castle must have burned its telltale shape away.

     “Someone took leapfrog too seriously,” you mutter.

     “Ribbit,” Jade says simply. She jumps off the crumbling frog feet, and her hair bounces when her feet hit the ground. A piece of the column you’re leaning on breaks away in your hand, and you flinch away from it, suddenly worried that your weight will crack it in half.

     “So what’s any of this got to do with Jack?” you ask. “I don’t think his sword is big enough to chop up a whole castle.”

     Jade continues down the wide corridor with her hands behind her back, hopping on the darker tiles in a makeshift game of hopscotch. She doesn’t turn her head back to answer.

     “He ruptured the battlefield with the Green Sun’s fire. Like nuclear fission, kind of.”

     “Oh, _good_ , he can set off atomic bombs, too.” Your tail skims the dust of debris that coats the floor, and the ceiling above you rains down a fresh cloud of plaster. You raise your good wing to shield yourself from it. “Can you do that, too?”

     “Of course.”

     She says it matter-of-factly. Your shoulders twinge at her tone.

     “Have you tried?”

     “No. But I know I could.”

     She rounds a corner and vanishes, and before you follow her your eyes trail to four massive tapestries hanging from the wall. The light from a smashed-out window filters in and illuminates the only one that hasn’t been torn to ribbons – billowing and gold, it displays the bright white spiral emblem of Space.

 

     You thought that this wouldn’t be so different from exploring Harley Manor, that you’d feel the same curiosity you did while trailing the impossible length of her home. But you don’t think this feels much like exploration at all – you’re just tagging along after Jade, who seems to know full well where she’s going. You follow her silently up a white marble staircase, glazed with shards of blue and pink from the stained glass windows. Now and then there’s a tall window with its mosaic patterns still intact, and the colors of them quiver, impressionistic, along Jade’s outline.

     Every hallway you pass looks the same, dark tiles splashed with dark brown blood. The bodies they belong to have disappeared, perhaps fallen into the pits of the tower and into the crater outside. Jack left no one here alive. Your stomach flips.

     It doesn’t occur to you to ask Jade where she’s going. You stop watching your surroundings after a while, instead keeping your eyes on the emotions flashing in her ears. They’re pressed flat against her hair, occasionally twitching to pick up the sound of the tower’s weakened foundation groaning. She doesn’t say anything, and you’ve lost the willpower to fill the silence with chatter. There’s nothing here to joke about, just the reeking remains of an old slaughter.

     The dark stairs relent to a shaft of gray beaming in from a trap door in the ceiling. Bits of dust dance in it, and the loose strands of Jade’s hair glow in the shine. The details of her figure are erased when she ascends to the pinnacle of the tower, washed out by the light that reflects off of the white mist. You fold your wings so you can make it through to the roof, then gasp in the chill of your altitude. Jade seems unbothered in her long sleeves, but you have to wrap your arms around yourself.

     Half of the tower’s top has been blasted away. The wall that outlined it looks almost eroded by time, and the checkered tile is sloshed with brown and black. Oil, maybe? A gust of wind blows through your feathers and ruffles Jade’s hair. She holds her ponytail in place with one hand, then turns to you for the first time.

     “John died up here, you know.”

     You swallow, blinking suddenly at the sound of his name. She nearly never says it aloud.

     “He came back, of course. Jack killed him too quickly for it to matter.” Her voice doesn’t even crack. “I really thought he’d come back this time, too.”

     You start to hold your hand up to rest it on Jade’s shoulder, but she walks past you to where a table has overturned in the middle of the pinnacle. Her hands spark with green, and it hovers to an upright position, its crumpled tablecloth draped on top of it. A cracked teapot, a cup, and a plate dusted with hard crumbs return to their haphazard places, but whatever else was resting on it has been thrown into the abyss.

     “Who thought that having a tea party during the middle of the game was a good idea?” you venture.

     “John’s father,” Jade answers. She examines her work, then stretches her hand out to adjust the tablecloth. Satisfied, she pulls one of its two chairs out and sits. “And Rose’s mother.”

     You get the urge to laugh out loud without being able to explain why. It seems awfully in character for them – John’s goofball, pie-wielding dad paying no heed to the war below, Rose’s mom – _your_ mom – deciding that she could find time to have a drink even during the apocalypse. A compulsion she passed on to her daughter. The stains splattered across the white tablecloth make your vision fuzz – is that blood or wine? Wine or blood? Is it anything at all? There was so much of it, webbing between your fingers. It sunk into the azure earth, mixing with radioactive gold. His body lingers at the edges of your sight.

     You feel your balance waver.

     “They’re all gone,” Jade says. She’s still watching the table. The teapot rolls on its side under her fidgeting hands. “I buried them.”

     A flashbulb memory returns to you – yourself in the doorway, Jade with her knees pulled up on a couch from John’s house. You drift over to the table, feeling your tail coil away from the stains on the cloth. Jade's eyes flicker up at you when you ease yourself into the chair.

    You’re stricken with performance anxiety, and a hundred different thoughts pop into your head, all pushing to be blurted out. _Hey, Jade, have you ever thought about how John’s dad was your half-brother?_ No, wait, even better: _Wow, I’m sitting in the same spot where my mom died. Is that fucked up or what?_ Maybe it’s a good thing that Jade is the first to speak.

     “I’m sorry you couldn’t bury your brother, Dave,” she murmurs. She starts to open her mouth again, then thinks better of whatever she’s about to say. Then she simply hangs her head, nails clicking on porcelain.

     You mean to shrug, but it just looks like you’re shivering. “Y’know, it seemed like a great idea at the time, but I just don’t. Hm.” You rub your face and drag your mouth into a dramatic frown. “I don’t really know what I would have said. I’ve never been to a funeral. I don’t know what you’re even supposed to do.”

     “Didn’t you have anything to say?”

     You sigh and reach out for the cracked teacup to fiddle with its edges. A ring of moldy tea stains the bottom of it.

     “I’m sure I _did_. I think I must’ve convinced myself I’d invent something to say eventually. Maybe there was nothing to say at all.”

     “I’m sure that’s not true.”

     You can feel her looking at you, but when you don’t respond right away she lets her eyes lower, perhaps with embarrassment. With the nerves that twinge in your shoulders, you can’t do anything but examine the blots of dark wine on the tablecloth. You try to find a shape in it – a giraffe, a butterfly, a pair of scissors opened all the way. Anything to keep your eyes away from the brown blood creeping up the sides of the table.

  


     “Maybe not. I’m talkin’ out my ass here.” You chew the inside of your mouth. “It might be lucky I never got the chance to bury him. Out of sight, out of mind, y’know? I’m sure nobody would’ve wanted to watch me deliver some pathetic excuse for a eulogy, anyway.”

     “Nobody is expecting you rattle off a perfect speech. None of us should have lost our guardians to begin with.”

     You feel a burning behind your eyes. Jade seems to see it, and maybe she does – all the atoms of your tears pushing to get out of you.

     “There’s nothing pathetic about looking for closure,” Jade says quietly.

     The wind changes direction, and the rolling clouds give way to a brighter white. Her hair dances in front of her face, but she doesn’t move to brush it out of the way. She just looks at you, willing you to understand.

     God, you want so badly to kiss her.

     Jade blinks, bewildered, when you crack into uncontrollable laughter. Your gut tightens with your sudden, rasping peals. Her eyebrows furrow like she thinks you’re making fun of her.

     “What? What are you laughing at?”

     You don’t have an answer. The tears you were holding back come out, and you’re grateful you can pass them off for tears of laughter. You wipe your cheeks with your rough palms.

     “Do you ever think about how bizarrely nightmarish our lives are?” you ask finally.

     Jade’s expression softens. She releases her grip on the cracked teapot and reaches across the table, taking one of your hands in hers. Your heart beats at an avian pace in your ribs.

     “All the time.”

     You think she’s about to say something else, but again she closes her mouth. Her eyes stray to the edge of the pinnacle, and you follow her gaze, staring out at the shattered battlefield hanging in the sky.


	23. Chapter 23

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 01 August, 2009

 

     The radio cracks, makes a sound like popcorn weakly popping. You kneel on the floor and keep your face pressed close, trying to detect any trace of a coherent signal. Behind you, Davesprite sneezes, and your ears turn involuntarily towards the source. He sniffs and starts talking again.

     “All right, so, new scenario –”

     “I’m sure it will be just as doubtful, but if you must.”

     “Okay Stephen Hawking, tone the sass dials down on your backtalk machine and hear me out.”

     Davesprite swings back and forth in one of the control deck’s pilot chairs, letting his tail coil on the damask carpet. His hand flits over all the countless knobs and switches and gauges, his claws clicking on them to see if any will react. A few modules that resemble thermometers are bobbing up and down – you guess they’re reporting the internal temperatures of the boiler room below.

     Many of the battleship’s functions have shut down now that you’re doing the piloting in its stead. Following that logic, and considering that you’re sailing through the seams of reality’s fabric, it should be impossible for the radio to pick up anything being emitted. But that’s not stopping you from trying anyway. It whines when you inch one its dials to the left, and your eye twitches at the shrill noise.

     “Instead of flying out there, you could just, like… zap to the surface of the window, and, I don’t know, throw a rock at it?”

     You sigh through your teeth. “I _told_ you not five minutes ago, we are not in the Green Sun’s domain. It’s literally out of my hands – we can’t teleport if I don’t have access to the Sun.”

     Davesprite toggles a switch absentmindedly, making an orange display light flash on and off. “Okay, but you take us to different planets all the time. I’ve seen you teleport to the shower because you didn’t feel like walking."

     “That is a completely different situation.”

     “How.”

     “Well, for one thing, I’m sticking within a half-mile radius. Teleporting within a tight vacuum is not the same thing as trying to launch myself to the edge of whatever this plane is. It would be an incredible strain.”

     “I think you’re bullshitting me.”

     You shake your head and focus all four of your ears on the soft popping coming from the radio. For a moment you think you catch a voice, but it’s gone just as quickly. Agitated, you twist the dial a millimeter side to side, but the signal is lost.

     “Why do you want to know so badly? It’s much too early to arrive, anyway.”

     “I don’t know. Seeing that thing just bugs me, I guess.” He gestures vaguely to the fenestrated window on the horizon.

     “Tell me about it.”

     Davesprite clicks his tongue. “Is it possible for a window to look taunting? Like, _neener neener neener_ , you’ll never catch me alive?”

     You poke your head over the console and peek at the window. Its glass reflects a brilliant flash of yellow that streaks across the void.

     “I can see it.” You glance back at him. “The wires coming out are like its little fingers waving at its face.”

     “We should teach that thing to pick on someone its own size.” He starts to fiddle with one of the buttons along the edge of the console, and your hand shoots up.

     “Dave, don’t press that thing! You’re going to launch an escape pod.”

     His hand lowers. “This thing has escape pods?”

     “Yes, you didn’t know? There’s, like, at least ten of them left across from the boilers.”

     “Wait, so,” Davesprite squints and examines the ceiling. “Those things aren’t engines?”

     “Engines? No, of course not."

     He raises his eyebrows. “Huh. You’d think I’d know that place like the back of my hand from lurkin’ down there so much.”

     “You learn something new every day. Let’s not scare anyone by shooting something into the abyss, though, okay?”

     He kneads his chest, feigning surprise. “I think that’s the loudest I’ve ever heard you talk. _Indoor_ voices, Jade.”

     “I didn’t mean to harm your delicate constitutions.”

     “Zap me my smelling salts, I’m feeling faint….”

 

     You slump down below the control deck and fiddle with the radio again, switching frequencies to see if anything will appear on _this_ wavelength instead. Surely something could still be active, couldn’t it?

     The numbers on the thin screen scramble around, and you grit your teeth when the speakers blare an unpleasant warble. A canine whine of protest rumbles in your throat.

     “Why are you so intent on that thing. If the chat client doesn’t work then the radio shouldn’t, either.”

     “I’m looking for something in particular.”

     “What.”

     “Something Prospitian,” you sigh. “If it exists at all.”

           

     The idea to dick around in here came from a memory that stirred in your first minutes of waking. Vague images always come and go with the fuzzing of your vision, shifting as you stare up at the copper ceiling and mistake it for your dream room.

     Your ribs ache for that room. The Skaialight was a technicolor white that coasted brilliantly across the pink carpet and shimmered off of the flowers you hung from the sills. With the high altitude of the tower, your room always smelled cool and crisp, always prickled your skin with goosebumps. It made you a bit breathless, waking up in your soft yellow gowns and breathing in the cold air of the Medium. Your consciousness fell effortlessly into your dream body, resuming action with fluid ease. Like walking through a curtain.

     It was impossible to fly through the columns and arches of Prospit without hearing [music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMXwluMcGrg) trailing from some distant part of the moon – pan flutes, harps, fiddles, tabors, tin whistles – and it was _next_ to impossible not to be pulled into the dance. Prospitians could find any reason to host a festival, and for long weeks of the year the city would be strung up with pastel banners, whipping and waving in the winds given off by Skaia’s jet streams. The square became flooded with white shells, all convulsing in a massive, rhythmic dance.

     You grow up with the sound of their doll hands clapping to the beat, swinging you around and around until you were lost amid dozens of bodies twirling at once. A great cheer would rise up when the people saw their princess join in. Your lavender slippers would scarcely touch the cobblestone; every few seconds a new pawn would lift you up off your feet and swing you in circles, your hands held above in their armored fingers. It took you a long time to learn the moves simply because you never _had_ to perform them on your own – all you had to do was let a Prospitian take you in their arms and pass you off to a new partner.

     A great, organic mandala ebbed and flowed, and in the middle of the gleaming white crowd, you knew at last what it meant to be safe, to be part of something bigger than yourself. And the music plays on.

     This morning, you woke up with a vaguely remembered harmony, a piercing flute and the hollow bass of a drum. For a moment as you lie in bed, you felt the drop in your stomach as a Prospitian woman picked you up by the waist and lead you through the fairy ring of the mass waltz. She spun you once, and your skirts formed a cymbal, and then your feet were on the ground again and your legs spasmed under the sheets from the descent.

     You don’t know if the Prospitians on this ship will ever dance again. If they did, it certainly wouldn’t live up to the ones you grew up with, all those swarming chessfolk coursing through the streets and careening with linked arms around the edges of fountains. Not even the gym would be big enough.

     Still, you’d love to hear it again.

 

     “Something Prospitian,” Davesprite repeats.

     “Well, to be more specific, I’m sifting for signals they might have left behind.”

     “I thought you were just listening for numbers stations. Tryin’ to get that fresh war intel.”

     “No, no.” You purse your lips, trying to pick a tune out of the white noise. Frustrated, you keep finagling. “I’m listening for music. And I have half a mind to disassemble this whole panel.” You thump your fist on the console, and one of the red lights above the radio sputters.

     “Oh, so you’re on the search for Skaia’s Number One Rock Station.”

     “Sure, if that’s what you want to call it.”

     “And where exactly would this magic station be coming from.”

     Your ears flick. “Radio towers are still standing in a few isolated locations on Skaia. I just don’t know which frequencies they run on, or whether they’re broadcasting anything coherent.” The radio gurgles lowly. “At this point, I would be satisfied if I found anything besides static. You know, most battleships on Earth had entire radio _rooms_. I wish I knew why they skimped so badly.”

     “The moons are like, practically stuck in medieval times. Can hardly believe they have shit like computers at all.” Davesprite spins in his chair and fluffs his wings out.

     “Or maybe Prospit was just blowing its military budget on escape pods.”

     “Call in a request for ‘Free Bird’ when you get ahold of it.”

 

     You flip some switches off and pull an antenna all the way out, twisting it according to the fluctuating whines coming from the speakers. The static burps and changes its pitch – getting closer. You hold your breath and turn all the dials at once with your Bec powers. Something weasels through the noise, and your heart catches in your throat. Was that just another string of interference, or the high-pitched whistle of a flute?

     “Did you hear that?” you whisper.

     “Uh, no.”

     “I think I caught something!” You release the dials, adjusting them by nanometers for fear of losing the signal altogether. “I hope Bec’s ears aren’t playing tricks on me.”

     “Reel ‘er in already.”

     You bite your bottom lip and turn everything just a bit to the left, and….

           

     “Okay, I hear _that_ ,” Davesprite says. He blinks in blank surprise, his mouth a little bit open. Across the room, the radio spits a crackly swing tune.

     “I can’t believe it! Oh my _gosh_ , just listen to it!” You bob up and down in your kneeling position, hands pressed to your mouth. A grainy trumpet blares out of the speakers and directly into your dog ears.

     “What kind of lunatic civilization takes the time to set up music stations on a fucking battlefield?”

     “The Prospitians are a very musical people,” you say simply. “They probably programmed this station for fun! I was counting on them being _lunatics_ enough to do that.”

     Giddy, you pull yourself upright and seat yourself on the deck, your hair brushing the scuffed glass. Davesprite still looks shocked that your efforts yielded any results, but you think you see the tip of his sprite tail fidgeting to the fast-paced piano.

     “This doesn’t sound like Prospitian music, though,” you wonder aloud. You ears swivel around to pick up the differences. “There was certainly less… brass.”

     “Yeah, it’s pretty jazzy.” Davesprite taps his talons on the arm of his chair. “Y’know, this kinda sounds Dersite to me.”

     “I thought you never went into the city?”

     “Well, no, not much.” He scrunches his mouth. “Maybe a couple times, now that I think of it. I didn’t really like what I found there, though. Talk about an unsavory fucking culture.”

     “I mean, _yeah_ , you guys lived on the Medium equivalent of Pluto. You’re, like, um. What do they call the people who live in sewers?”

     “Mole people.”

     “You’re like mole people,” you giggle. Your heels thump against the console, and a few switches dig into your calves.

     “You wound me.” Davesprite swivels his chair in a circle. “But yeah, life on Derse isn’t like the fuckin’ Renaissance fair you’re used to. It’s basically what happens when _The Godfather_ becomes real life.” He pauses. “I mean, I guess it sort of already was, since the Mob is real, but you know what I mean.”

     “Sounds scary.” You ignore that you don’t know what _The Godfather_ is.

     “Listen… okay. The only music you ever hear on Derse is like, if you walk past a seedy alleyway and hear it coming out of a door like some kinda underground Prohibition speakeasy. Like, knock on the door five times fast and a chess dude will open a slit way above eye level and ask what’s the password, bub.”

     “Is this from experience?”

     “Mm, a lot of what I know about ‘em comes from Rose. Remember? She tried to be bosom buddies forever with every last fucking person down there.”

     You bounce your toes up and down to a caterwauling trumpet duet, battling with the piano to get through the static. Your shoulders sway. “I remember.”

     “I think I went down there so little ‘cause of the looks they give you. It’s like, shit, take a picture, dude, it’ll last longer.” He shrugs, nodding his head to the chord. Someone in the recording stomps their feet to match the beat, and another player shouts a riff. “I guess I also didn’t think that chess people could replace humans. For interaction, I mean.”

     Your toes flex.

     “But they’re fucked up, too. They… I guess they kind of have a thing about journalism? Or, uh, ‘tabloids’ would be the better word. They eat that shit up. Was that a thing on Prospit?”

     “We had broadsides plastered to most of the doors in the square, but….”

     “Christ, _broadsides_. Okay.” Davesprite snorts, then cracks into laughter when you rub your neck and smile. “What the Dersites love are _rags_ , y’know? The kind of sleazy journalism you’d find in a grocery store checkout lane.”

     “Oh, yes. The rags.”

     “You know what I’m talking about?”

     “Vaguely.”

 

     You know _of_ them, though you never had the misfortune of flipping through the pages of one yourself. The White Queen hated those newspapers with a passion. She had them delivered to her every day by courier, and when you got to be about ten, she couldn’t hide her disgust with them anymore. You’d come down for a visit in her gardens and find her grumbling over the violet papers, sometimes in the process of tearing them in half. Scarcely anything got her so riled, and it disturbed you to see her reposeful stature crack. When asked, though, she would always wave her hand and have a handmaid take them away.

     “There is nothing in here for you to fret over, lovely,” she’d say, clicking her fingers along the side of her head the way other women would tuck their hair behind their ears.

     “Why are you so mad, then? What’s happened?”

     “One of the truths a princess must come to accept is that there are always those prepared to slander her name for no other purpose but entertainment,” the Queen sighed. She started to say something else, then closed her mouth, her hard mandible clicking into place to make her face look featureless.

     “Did someone write something about you?” you pressed.

     The Queen reached across the mosaic table and took your hand lightly in hers. “Don’t think on it too much, Princess.” She cast a glance over the castle terrace.

     “I only mean that you shouldn’t take to heart what anyone says about you,” she adds in a quiet voice. “Not if you know it to be untrue.”

     Well, you learn soon enough that the Dersites have been writing about you for years. An easy target, highly visible, always out and about. It isn’t until after the Queen accidentally leaves one of the papers lying with the front page out that you really start to notice the Dersites – the ones who don’t seem to be on official business, anyway. They lurk about, following you in a way they must think is subtle. You start tricking them by using the street less often, hopping from roof to roof where their cameras can’t point. Once, you get a Prospitian guard to threaten a paparazzo with a nightstick – which, predictably, only feeds your Dersite reputation as a peevish, self-absorbed ditz. Don’t take it to heart, though, right?

 

     “You ever read ‘em?”

     You brush back your bangs. “No.”

     Davesprite whistles lowly and shakes his head. “Good for you, then. Did _not_ like what they had to report on.”

     “Let me guess.” You cross your ankles. “Were they writing about me?”

     “Yeah, actually. I mean, the back issues I found, anyway. There were these copies I got ahold of that were, uh. Kind of messed up.”

     “In what way?”

     A blaring saxophone pokes through the speakers.

     “They just aren’t too respectful of the dead.”

     You bite your lip. “Yeah, I know.”

 

     The song coming through fades into a new one, and your ears perk when you catch the warble of a tin whistle.

     “Hey! _This_ is more like it,” you yelp. You hop down from the deck and sway in place, trying to follow what little of the beat can be heard past the static.

     Davesprite adjusts himself when the twitching of his sprite tail gets too obvious. “This sounds like what would happen if tourneys used flappers instead of knights,” he says. “And instead of lances they use, like, feathered fans. Low mortality rate ‘cept for the people who sneeze themselves off their horses.”

     “I think that what we’re listening to,” you say, swinging your shoulders, “is a fine example of cultural exchange.”

     You three-step your way to Davesprite’s chair and startle him when you pull him out by his hands.

     “Oh, no,” he starts. “No, no, no-no-no –”

     You step side to side, moving him along with the beat. “Come _on_ , you can’t just sit _down_ while this stuff is playing!”

     “Oh yes I can,” he protests. His fingers fidget in your palms, bobbing along loosely like a pigeon. “Part of being a cool kid is apathy, Jade. Which obviously includes non-participation.”

     “I don’t think so,” you laugh. You lift your arm to form a diamond shape between you, then spin Davesprite under your arm. He squawks in indignation and fluffs his wings out.

     “Jade, I gotta say, I’m feeling some mad disrespect here. Like, how do you expect me dance without fucking _feet_?”

     “Just remember to mind your gait!” you tease.

     “Wow, that never stops being hilarious.”

     The trumpet blares to the bass of a low drum that reminds you of the tabor drummers on Prospit. You’re not really dancing – it’s more like you’re nudging Davesprite around in a half-baked attempt to make him follow the music himself. His lack of legs lends to a buoyancy that would make him a fine dance partner if he picked up the pace, though.

     The players on the radio stomp to the beat, their shelled feet hollow on whatever stage they were recording from. You mimic it with your own feet, delicately switching the weight between your heels. Davesprite keeps his eyes averted, watching your linked fingers. You swap the position of your arms to the clapping in the recording, always keeping one of your pairs of arms outstretched, and without music it would look like you were pushing off of each other in some version of wrestling.

     “You look like you’re about to fall over,” you snicker. Davesprite’s face glows yellow.

     “I’ve got this baby wing makin’ me all disproportionate. It’s like I got two left feet.”

     “Don’t worry, I won’t let you trip.”

     To your surprise, Davesprite crows with a sudden laugh when you dip him over, his long feathers brushing the carpet of the control deck. He looks flushed when you pull him back upright. His talons press into the tops of your hands.

     “You serenading me or something? Better hope the paparazzi ain’t outside taking down notes on the scandal of the year.” Davesprite’s movement shifts, moving his shoulders front to back on his own.

     “Not so bad, is it?” You glance down and see that Davesprite’s tail bouncing along, imitating your side-stepping.

     “Guess not. Doing regular leg stuff definitely tops the list of things I miss like hell.” You pull him towards you and push him away again in quick succession, and the feathers on his arms tickle your elbows. “It’s real vague, but they’re there. I can sorta feel them.”

     A chorus of trumpets starts up again, reeling the brass back in. You inhale sharply when Davesprite extends his good wing and spins you under his arm, the tip of his thumb claw skimming your knuckles. When you complete your turn, he clasps your hand tightly in his and keeps you inches from himself, rather than letting the two of you sail off in opposite directions. It’s your turn to be the one looking away.

     “You sure got the hang of this,” you murmur.

     “Didn’t seem like there was much to it.” He laughs “I feel like I’m really channeling my inner Duke Ellington.”

     “I think you’re off by about twenty years.”

     “What’s that supposed to mean.”

     “This sounds much more like a forties tune to me!” Your ears twitch. “At _least_ late thirties.”

     “How do you figure.”

     “Dave, there is an _obscene_ number of records that are sitting in my house as we speak. Trust me, I can pin a date on a song to a T.”

     “I didn’t know you were such a connoisseur,” Davesprite teases.

     The music dips into quiet, the deep plucking of cello strings vibrating through the radio panel and under the floor. He lets go of your hands, using his wings to shift his weight side to side. You slip up for a moment when the draft works between you, but then his wing sweeps out again to invite you back into his proximity, folding over the distance between you. Your face warms when his staticy tail brushes your ankles.

     The tinkling piano returns, and something inside of you yawns with nostalgia.

 

     You are in the atrium, the glass panels of the roof far, far above you. An indistinct trumpet swirls out of the hanging speakers and echoes in the high ceiling. Your hands are held aloft in your grandfather’s calloused palms, your feet on his leather shoes so that your little legs can keep up with the dance. Your sneakers click together with each of his side-steps.

     It took him a little while to find the perfect song, grumbling over dusty record sleeves that whispered as he flipped through their crate. You love the hollow, static hiss that the record makes when the needle first skims its surface – you’d be happy just to watch it wobble on its turntable. When the noise gives way to music, your grandfather lifts you up and lets you touch your fingertips softly to the record’s edge. The texture makes you shiver.

     “Feel those ridges?” he asks. “Each little bump produces a sound when the needle strikes it. You can’t see them with your eyes,” he says, tapping the frame of his glasses. “But each one makes up an infinitesimal piece of the song. Exactly the way that your cells make up _you_.”

     The piano player inside the record thumps away madly at the keys, and you shriek with laughter when your grandfather swings you in a circle, your shoelaces waving in the air.

 

     “As much of a connoisseur as one can be,” you retort. You shimmy your shoulders to the piano, and your hair bounces to brush your cheeks each time you turn your head. “I have experience.”

     “Are you telling me that the blood, sweat, and tears I put into my culture lesson were for naught?” The primaries of his wing cup your calf, encouraging you closer. The plates of his arms brush yours. “It’s no easy task to find the perfect ClipArt, y’know.”

     “No, it was much appreciated! I just know more about history than modern times. Old Empire Egypt? Dark Ages Germany? No problem. Anything in the past forty years? Not so much.”

 

     The reception crackles, and the trumpet temporarily dissolves. Your ears swivel back to distinguish the music through the interference, but it’s too grainy. Davesprite looks like he’s about to take your hands up again, but the static makes him stop, and he lets his arms drop to his sides. Your feet finally cease their movement, and you stretch your arms above your head.

     “The old records at home are in much higher quality, too. It’s been a while since I’ve dusted them off. Maybe we could listen to them sometime?”

     “Sock hop at Harley’s, huh. Okay, count me in,” he says. He pushes the back of the pilot’s chair, making it spin in circles.

     You bounce on your soles, clasping your hands together. “Cool! It’s a date.”

     Your smile freezes on your face as soon as you say it. Davesprite laughs nervously, and you swallow because your throat is so dry.

 

     The radio gives one last hiccup, and what was left of the piano gurgles into white noise.


	24. Chapter 24

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 06 August, 2009

 

     Being in Jade’s atrium at night reminds you of those high-class penthouse apartment parties that you always see in movies. Well, all right, there’s no CEOs in tailored suits, nor models wearing necklaces big as the ice statues, nor is there a gleaming skyline of city lights outside. There’s also no banquet table, nor soft murmurs of _did you hear_ or _how nice to see you again_ , nor waiters weaving between guests with towering champagne glasses, nor – okay, you know what? Trash that line of thought. It’s nothing like a penthouse apartment party at all.

     LOFAF hangs in the shadows of your pitch-black room, lazily circling the battlefield. No, there’s no skyline, just a sea of trees that are invisible in the darkened, muggy rainforest below. You can see through the atmosphere, though, that Jade’s phone is blipping with a white light as it charges on the bedsheets. From your vantage point, it looks like the lights they put on towers so planes won’t fly into them.

     (It took you a long time to learn what the lights were for, because your bro always told you that the government used them to spy on you.)

     Sure, the atrium has no business hosting any parties whatsoever. The glitter of glass under the windows is probably a health hazard, for one thing. Not to mention the dirt caking the floor tiles, as well as the shards of shattered flower pots. So there’s no high-class guests from the front covers of magazines to fill the room with noise, but Jade is here, and her energy makes the room feel full.

 

     You don’t think it took much negotiation on your part to convince Jade that rebuilding the greenhouse might be a good idea. Maybe she was planning it already when you were ascending the spiral staircase.

     The atrium was swamped with the smell of wet soil and the sour tinge of rotting vegetation, the air heavy with humidity leaking in from outside. Jade toed the half-moon of an empty pot out of her way, and it rolled slowly away, crunching the glass dust. You whistled lowly, your feathers puffing involuntarily at the damp smell.

     “It’s pretty unsafe to have a sock hop if you can’t wear socks without cutting your feet open,” you say.

     She brought her hand to her mouth and chewed the skin around her thumb nail. “I think I managed to convince myself that it wasn’t such a mess.”

     “That’s a pretty wild magic trick, then.”

     “Did it always smell so bad?”

     “I think the smell is new.”

     Jade sighed heavily, then bent down to pick up a withering flower that had been tossed from its pot. She turned the crisp petals over in her fingers, brown and furled at the edges. You watched from beside a column, nervously kneading the swirling marble.

     “I hate to break it to you, Jade, but it looks like someone robbed the outdoor section of a Lowe’s. This stuff has got to go.”

     Jade swiped her hands quickly underneath her eyes. She shook the soil from her palms, flexing her fingers at the texture.

     “I really have to clean it up, don’t I?”

     You folded your wings in so tight that their muscles complained.

     “Do you not want to?”

     She rested a curled finger on her lips, furrowing her brows as she looked out the smashed windows. Outside, a hot breeze rustled the forest canopy.

     “I mean, I guess I don’t.…” she made an exasperated noise and threw her hands up. “I guess I don’t have a choice, do I? It’s just going to… they’re all going to… _shit_.”

     “They’re all going to shit.”

     Jade laughed with her hand covering her eyes. She shook her head, and when she looked back at you her eyes were sharp.

     “Yes, Dave, they’re all going to shit.” She pulled her hair back, looking smaller than before. “I guess I’d better hop to it, then. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

     “What was that.”

     “Nothing.”

 

     This thing hurts your ghost ass. You shift your hands to your lap, ninety percent sure that you’ll stab your palms with splinters if you keep them on the table. Across the room, Jade stands with her hands on her hips, murmuring the damage toll under her breath. You count the bobs of her head as she takes note of how many pots are still intact.

     “You got a plan for how we’re gonna do this?”

     Jade pauses her count and waves her hand. “It’ll be easy. I’ve thought a lot about honing my technique since last time.”

     “You mean we’re not gluing shit back together with molten lava? ‘Cause that was hardcore.”

     “Hardcore, maybe, but not very practical for the task ahead.” Jade claps her hands together, letting go of a high-pitched exhale. “All right, let’s begin.”

     “Let’s HGTV this shit,” you call from your perch. Your tail tip skitters when it brushes an errant orange that’s far past rotten.

     She gives one last tug on her ponytail holder, patting her hair into place.

     “Okay!”

 

     The floor hums, and when you look down you can see all the infinitesimal dots of glass bouncing on the shining tile. The flower pots holding up your table clatter as they thump, and you pull your tail towards you to avoid being cut. Jade raises her hands up like a conductor, and chunks of the atrium’s walls, great and small, begin to hover into place. They glitter chartreuse, refracting the neon color of the Green Sun. The floor sparkles, iridescent as a discotheque.

     You stare up the length of the greenhouse, feeling your mouth slack open. Jade separates her fingers and turns her palms outward, and the sound is shrill as the windows rearrange themselves piece by piece. You duck when a triangle of glass sails past you to click inside of its slot, and soon after you have to draw your wing in to make room for a cloud of dust. The nebula of shrapnel soars upward, lining the steel edges of the shattered ceiling. An umbrella would have been advisable.

     There’s a sound like the trembling jewels of a chandelier, and you hear Jade laugh as a swarm of shards shoot in through the remaining holes, filling the spaces left behind – it’s all the glass that rained below when they first exploded. By the smirk on Jade’s face, you can tell she’s proud of pinpointing every last atom of the atrium’s great windows.

     Everything in its place, Jade keeps her fingers curled, and the billion billion pieces of glass glow. They surge and flicker with the light of her powers, and the swirling neon turns her greenhouse literally green.

     “One last thing!” chirps Jade.

     Awestruck by the pulsing color, you don’t answer.

     Jade balls her hands into fists, and in a nuclear burst of microwave heat that blows your hair back, the windows shine with a crackling yellow. Static shock tingles your skin when the light sputters out. Jade sighs with satisfaction, and you crane your neck to look at the ceiling. Every pane of glass is filled in, shimmering to reflect the hanging light bulbs that she replaced not too long ago – more lights for the skyline. The rainforest is sealed out, and the air cools.

     “Done!” she says. “I think it turned out all right, don’t you?”

     You drift from the table and stretch your hand out to skim the nearest window. The texture is anything but smooth, sort of like mosaic tiles. It feels welded together. Your reflection twists and contorts against the black of the planet outside, like looking at yourself in the water. You turn back to give her a questioning look, and she snickers behind her hand.

     “I set off an ‘atomic bomb.’ Except instead of blowing everything apart, I fused the particles together! Better than lava, right?”

     “A lot better. A lot more hardcore, too.” Both of you grin, and you feel a rush of secondhand adrenaline. “Like, shit, that was _intense_.”

     Jade’s cheeks tinge red, and she flips her bangs out of her face. “Thanks! I’m just getting started, though.”

     “I don’t think my fragile heart can take much more, if we’re being real here.”

     She scrunches her nose at you and pushes her glasses up, glinting white light.

     “It’d better, because this is the fun part!”

 

     The flower pots rattle, terracotta clinking as they roll upright. With an upward sweep of her arms, they soar to rest on the wooden planks of her tables. Great clouds of dirt unclump and drift apart, and she lowers them into the few empty pots she could salvage. You release a slow whistle, watching everything flicker with neon green.

     “This is some _Sorcerer’s Apprentice_ shit,” you say. “I’m tellin’ you, Mickey, you better hope you got home insurance for when all your shit starts like, gaining sentience and dumping lake water in here.”

     “Mm, but most everything’s broken.” Jade snaps her fingers, and in a flash the remaining mounds of soil and rotting fruit vanish. You can actually see the orange reflection of your tail in the white tile. Now that it’s clean, it looks like the floor of a perfume department. The lights above form cloudy halos down the aisles.

     “Where’d you dump everything?”

     “Made it compost.” She shrugs, brushing her hands on her pant legs. “Either that, or it’s about to become someone’s next meal. I’m sure an iguana or something will try to eat it.”

     Jade takes one of the terracotta pots in her hand, tossing it up and down in her palm as though checking it for hairline cracks. Then she blips it into her sylladex, and with a sound like the snapping-shut of a folder, a captchalogue card materializes in her hand. She turns it over, glances cursorily at the captcha code on the back, and turns on her heel to the Alchemiter against the wall. You trail after her, eager to watch alchemization in progress.

     Halfway across the room, Jade stops suddenly, and you nearly fly into her.

     “Oh! I forgot.”

     She raises her hand, and a cluster of seeds appears above her palm. They fall into her hand, and when she reopens her fingers, they too have been vanished into her inventory. Jade catches the captchalogue cards between her index and middle fingers.

     “I don’t really _need_ a sylladex anymore, but I guess we don’t have a choice when alchemization is basically keeping this ship alive….”

     Jade fans herself with the holographic cards, which glimmer yellow and blue under the light. She sighs at the Alchemiter the way your teachers always did when they couldn’t figure out how to erase something properly on the Smart Board.

     “What were all those seeds for.”

     Jade looks over at you and rests her foot on the ledge of the Alchemiter’s base.

     “Well, pretty much everything is dead. I mean, except for those,” she replies. She jerks her thumb back at the glazed flower pots she’s arranged neatly around her bed. “I can water them all I like, but nothing is going to happen. I need to do some resurrecting.”

     “Got it. Time to Lazarus this shit.” You drum your fingers on your hipbones. “You really have a choice setup here. Remember how cramped my game equipment was?”

     Jade nods, only half-listening as she spreads the cards across the platform. “My Alchemiter was in the grand foyer, originally. I zapped it up here not long after we started, designing and stuff….” She begins to trail off. “Anyway, it was bad feng shui.”

     “You gonna have room for all your stuff?”

     “It’ll be tight, but it’s not as though I need to grow all of this to _survive_ like I used to. I think I can afford to have a few less tables of veggies.”

     “Hm. You gonna alchemize any freaky hybrid plants?”

     But she’s already stopped listening. You sigh through your nose and try not to get offended that she’s showering attention on her plants for once.

     “Let’s see… so this is asparagus, onions, these are apples… this is… pumpkins? Man, I hope that one works,” she mutters. You watch from behind as Jade slides the card for her flower pot into the Punch Designix, then plucks another card out of the mix after brief deliberation. You have no idea which one it is.

     “All right, let’s get this in gear. Hm-hm-hmm, okay… we’re gonna want a lot of these.” She turns back to you. “Do you think ten pear plants is too much?”

     “I mean… how many species we workin’ with?”

     “Twenty-three,” she replies. Then she seems to answer her own question, smacking her forehead with her palm. “Ah, but we only have four tables left!”

     “What happened to the other ones? Can’t you bring them inside?”

     Jade pinches the bridge of her nose. “No, no, there isn’t room for them anymore. Let some animal make a nest out of them. Along with all those broken pots, _pssh_ , I’m sure they’ll make fine birds’ nests.” She counts silently, her index finger bobbing as she scans the remaining tables. “Okay, three of each should be fine if we just squeeze them together. That’s enough, right? I think that’s fair.”

     “Sure.”

     She nods to herself, then toggles the switch to increase the desired number of copies. The grist count required to complete the alchemization multiplies on a thin screen. You bite back suggestions, like the need to remind her to select the && option so she doesn’t alchemize herself a pot made out of seeds, or a tiny pot-shaped seed at that. You haven’t taken a crack at an Alchemiter in months, but with the downloaded knowledge buzzing away in your brain, it’s still an effort not to be a know-it-all.

     The smell when she pulls the lever is like burned popcorn, electrical and hot. You blink in the flash of light, and what appears on the platform are three… dirt-filled pots. Nothing is in them. You glance at Jade, but she seems to find no problem with the results. She hovers the pots in her hands, then slings them to a far-off corner of the atrium. They arrange themselves in a row.

     “Did it… work?”

     “Sure it did. The seeds are inside of them now – we just have to wait for them to grow.”

     “Oh. I was expecting full-grown pear trees.”

     Jade laughs and shakes her head. “Let this be a lesson in delayed gratification. We’ll be growing our plants just like any other. I can’t wait for it, actually.”

     Her face glows when she says this, her smile revealing deep dimples in her cheeks. You don’t think anyone else could manage to make digging around in the dirt seem so damn fun.

 

     Not fifteen minutes later, you have a greenhouse full of clean flower pots. The labels on the table ledges are curled and dirty, so Jade rips them off and asks you to relabel them for her. You follow her around the room, flicking glowing gold text wherever she directs you. All you have to do is think of the words, and they appear like a message in invisible ink. Jade is so impressed with your ghost font that she forgives you when you misspell “hydrangeas,” and you’re content to show her a skill that not even a god tier can pull off.

     And it doesn’t smell like wet dirt anymore, thank _god_. Now there’s just a pleasant earthiness, one that you recognize as the same scent that lingered on Jade’s skin for days. You inhale slowly, and the smell makes your blood race.

     Jade pulls two silver watering cans out from underneath a table, brushing off the cobwebs. They’re dented with use, splotches of hard dirt caked on in spots. She hands you one, and you accept it cautiously.

     “Wanna help me water them?”

     “I mean, maybe? I should warn you, Jade – I was never able to keep a Tamagotchi alive for more than two weeks. Little guys would be writhing in excrement by day five. Child services were called.”

     Jade crinkles her nose and brushes your comment off. “There’s really not much to it, this is preschool-level stuff. Here.”

     She pulls you over to the sillcock in the wall and cranks the water on. There’s a hollow rushing from inside as the pipes rattle, and the water that comes out splashes onto Jade’s shins. She yelps at the cold, grumbling while the spout fills the metal can.

     “Again with the air bubbles,” you hear her murmur. She motions for you to hand over your can, and a bit of water dribbles onto the floor as she switches them out. When she hands it back to you, the weight makes you gasp. You hold it with both hands, arms trembling. Jade totes her watering can in one hand, and you don’t sense that she finds it heavy at all.

     “All right, consider this your preliminary lesson in the ancient art of botany.”

     “Take it away, Sensei.”

 

     The bottom of your shirt is soaked through within thirty seconds.

     “Handle it carefully,” Jade says from afar. She’s not looking at you, so she must be listening to your frustrated grunts as the heavy watering can sloshes water everywhere but in the pot. “And don’t overdo it, okay? There is such a thing as too much water – we don’t want to drown the seeds.”

     “How much is too much.”

     “If the top of the pot looks like a puddle, then it’s too much.”

     “Gotcha.”

     “Thanks for helping out,” Jade adds. She sets her watering can down and tightens her ponytail, then she brushes her gloves off on the dingy apron she’s tied around her waist. “I was really worried that I wasn’t going to… hm. That I wouldn’t have the energy to work up here again? But it’s been really fun to involve someone else, you know?” She smiles and wipes a smudge of dirt from the rim of a pot of tulips.

     “No problem-o. It’s kind of tripping me out? Like, I think I forgot what plants and dirt felt like until I came back to this session. It’s probably gonna blow my fuckin’ mind when this shit actually starts sprouting.”

     “Wow,” says Jade. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I was living somewhere without plants.”

     “Yeah, well, comin’ from George of the Jungle I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

     Jade hides her mouth behind her middle finger, but you can see she’s still smiling. You burst into laughter.

     “It’s weird how you start to get used to being surrounded by flaming hot lava. Like, no, yeah, pretty sure I’ve sweated off twenty pounds this week, but on the other hand I’m forgetting what green looks like.”

     “We’re going to have to fix that,” Jade murmurs. She shakes one of her pots lightly, breaking up the dense soil inside.

     “What _I_ wanna know, though, is how you decided that gardening wasn’t the most redundant hobby in the world. You lived on a god damned tropical island, how did it make sense to take care of plants _indoors_.” The can is lighter now that you’ve moved on a couple rows. You stretch your wings out to drift above the table, watering the hard-to-reach pots in the middle.

     Jade hums under her breath. “Well, I had to grow my food up here. It was always fun, but it involved real work. Keeping track of what fruits would ripen in which seasons, ensuring that everything would be eaten in the right frame of time, and all without letting the rations go to waste. I had notebooks upon notebooks of inventory. It was kind of a chore.”

     She picks up a pot to make sure that the water is draining properly, then pats the edges of the soil down with her fingers.

     “I started gardening when I was… gosh, maybe three? The greenhouse was originally a space for Grandpa’s specimens to dry out and cure. It was part of studying the fauna of the surrounding area. He would have sharks and octopi spread out on these autopsy tables, and I helped him sew them back up again. The sharks, anyway. Sometimes dolphins.”

     You think of the mounted shark heads and shiver.

     “He moved that work up to the laboratory once I asked for the atrium.” Jade’s smile fades, and she rubs the handle of the watering can with one hand. “It started when I was sent pumpkin seeds in the mail for my birthday. I didn’t know anything about gardening, so I showed them to my grandpa and had him help me set it up. He thought it was good I was ‘cultivating my own interests,’ so to speak….”

     Your brow furrows. “You got sent pumpkin seeds when you were three?”

     “If I’m remembering correctly.”

     You remember a conversation with John from a long time ago. It must have been last June, though it feels like years ago. Didn’t you ask him what he was planning on sending her? Yes, you’re sure you did, but what had he decided on? Jade’s fingers twitch. She blinks at you from across the room like she’s realized what she’s said.

     “Jade, are there some shenanigans that need to be explained here?”

     She smiles apologetically. “Timelines have always been a malleable concept for me.”

     “Not cool. Leave that meta b.s. for the real Time players.”

     “What can I say?”

     She goes back to work, and you’re left to stare, knowing somehow that you’re not going to weasel an answer out of her this time.

     “But it’s weird… I’m really excited for some reason?” Jade looks flushed, her cheeks a little red. “Being in here always made me so happy. It was the best sort of feeling, watching everything bloom and change purely because of the effort I put forth to make them grow. Maybe that was why splicing together the Genesis Frog was so easy for me. Maybe it was cell memory.”

     She bites her bottom lip and smiles down at her gloves, and you feel a sharp hiccup of affection.

     “I’m tryin’ to think if I was ever head over heels with any of my hobbies like that,” you wonder aloud. You curse when you fill a flower pot too high with water, then try to sneakily pour the excess into the neighboring pot.

     Jade looks up. “There’s drawing, isn’t there? And rapping?”

     “No, yeah, I _do_ like doing that stuff… or I did? I _think_ I still do.”

 

     You consider it. When did you start drawing? Well, all kids draw, don’t they? When did you start making comics, then? You must have been nine. Your bro left his own work pasted all over the apartment, inside of the microwave and under the sink when you were still short enough to notice them there. One that sticks out to you, visceral and vivid as the day you saw it, was one that you found taped to the top of the medicine cabinet when you opened it to get the Neosporin out. You think it was a zebra, or maybe a fucked up okapi, but either way it was some sort of reenactment of _Psycho_. A dog in a trench coat was stabbing the zebapi to death in the shower. You threw open the shower door flinchingly, expecting something to pop out at you, but nothing did. Convinced that he was just pulling your leg, you locked the bathroom door and got into the shower without thinking on it further. But then you cranked the water on, and what came out was all red – he had dismantled the shower head and filled it with blood capsules. For weeks your brother refuses to wash the shower mat because he thinks the frantic, dark red footprints you left on it are hilarious, but soon enough the stains become permanent and he has to buy a new one to replace it.

     Then why did you start drawing comics, too? It wasn’t to psyche anyone out. You never printed any to mess with your bro – you’re sure that nothing could ever make that guy so much as flinch. Maybe you felt you had to? You _liked_ drawing, though, didn’t you? It was _fun_ , wasn’t it? And the attention you got from your blog didn’t hurt. You also knew you could have drawn something “better” if you cared enough – for a long time you try to mimic your bro, who seemed to have the finer aspects of sequential art under his belt. Like, some of his color palettes were _nice_. But even after you managed to find your own style, your work really didn’t fall too far from the tree. It was still all about being purposefully crappy just to prove to some ambiguous audience that you “didn’t care” about convention, whatever the hell that meant. For all you know, you were just lowering the collective standards of everyone who enjoyed your work. Could it be said that you were just yanking everyone’s chain, making them think that you were genuinely breaking some kind of mold? What were you trying to prove? Was it anything at all?

     You can’t debate that you genuinely like mixing, though. There was more work involved. It was always so much easier to imitate an art style than a beat – maybe that was why you never posted music online. You swapped files with your friends, sure, but you only ever managed a private SoundCloud that your bro probably had access to anyway. But finishing a song was always more satisfying than a comic, probably because you weren’t setting out for them to be “bad.” There was more pride attached, you guess. Posting SBAHJ was no big deal because they were shitty, you knew they were shitty, and everyone knew that _you_ knew they were shitty. It was part of the joke. For your music, though… well, you were still sensitive to criticism. You never even recorded your voice, and now you’re not sure you remember what it originally sounded like.

     Too bad you haven’t had any new ideas for music in months.

 

     “Maybe I didn’t care about drawing at all,” you say finally. “I think I would have liked it more if I wasn’t trying to make it be ‘Bad For The Ironies,’ you know? I mean, at least I never drew the same psychotic shit as my bro.” You tap your claws on the top of the hollow can. “For all the fuckin’ hours I put into those dumbass comics, I could have actually gotten good.”

     Jade sniffs, unconvinced, and moves on to a row of asparagus.

     “ _I_ thought they were good,” she says. “They were quaint.”

     You crow with a rasp of laughter. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone call SBAHJ ‘quaint.’ I’d like to thank the Academy….”

     “Oh, shush.” Jade brushes you off. “And what about your ‘sick raps,’ hmm, cool guy?”

     “Nah, I think that stands up as a legit hobby. Not sure if I have the mental energy, though. Or the imagination.”

     You sigh through your nose and skim your tail across the tile.

     “I don’t know. And I haven’t used a sword in months, either, and I don’t miss _that_ , but, like, what do you do if you’re not doing any of the things you thought qualified you as talented? Do you just… exist? Can you say that you’re spending your time well if you’re not _making_ something?”

     Jade looks at her hands, then tugs her work gloves off. She walks between the long aisle of tables to where you’re stationed, motions for you to put down the flower pot you’re fidgeting with. Confused, you set it aside.

     Then, to your stab of surprise, she throws her arms around your neck.

     The inhale you take is sharp, but you don’t feel your face warm. You just return the embrace slowly, your hands cautious until they finally decide to rest midway down her back. She looks up at you with a slight smile, and you will your heart not to pound against hers. Her fingers tickle your neck ruff, and it’s a strain not to shiver.

     “You can always pick up botany as an auxiliary hobby. I’m sure I’ll need plenty more help.”

     Your mouth tugs into a grin. “Maybe.”

     It’s hard to tell whether she’s trying to make you feel better, or whether she knows why she’s doing it at all. She rests her cheek on your collarbone, and the sigh you feel against your chest is a small one. You start to raise your arms to hug her closer, a hollow sting in your chest opening up that you weren’t aware of until now. When was the last time you hugged someone like this? Have you _ever_? You want to wrap your arms around her for as long as she’ll let you, bury your face in her hair so she can’t see you blinking back unexpected tears.

     And then she pulls away, leaving a draft behind. You stare after her, your arms hanging where they were.

     Jade fiddles with the knot of her apron as she walks away, untying it to fold it in a neat square. She tosses it over the ledge of the Alchemiter, and the apron droops forward to cover the slots of the Designix. Jade strides almost all the way to the transportalizer, then whips around and puts her hands on her hips.

     “By the way, you almost made me completely forget!”

     You blink, your mouth still open. “Forget what.”

     “The records, duh! The whole reason we’re here!”

     “Oh, right.”

     You almost add, _Yeah, the thing we’re basing this date on_ , but you don’t want to embarrass her. You’re sure she didn’t mean anything by it, anyway. Sometimes Jade the Feral Child, understandably, has no idea what she’s actually saying, and you can’t say you’re much better – your social filter is more like a soggy paper towel that someone hung up like a curtain instead of an actual door.

     Jade cracks her knuckles, and in an electric crackle of green, she appearifies the most old-fashioned record player you’ve ever seen in your life. It sits atop a small table with curved legs, its shiny wood gleaming in the harsh light of the ceiling lamp above it. The scallop-like horn, which must have been brilliantly gold in its day, is now a dusty brown. Its dials are gilt like its logo, and the crank looks like it could snap off if anyone touched it. This thing belongs in a museum.

     “Here it is!” Jade boasts. She brushes the dust off of its turntable. “Swiped it from the back of Grandpa’s office. It was up here until we upgraded the equipment,” she explains, pointing up at the hanging speakers. “We would listen to his old records when we were first setting up the greenhouse.”

     “Can I touch it? This business looks fragile as fuck.”

     “Oh, it is.” Jade mimics headphones by placing her hand over her ear, scratching an invisible record. “Please don’t attempt any DJing, okay?”

     “I’ll try not to succumb to impulse.”

     “Your cooperation is appreciated. Now! Let me sift through the collection here….”

     Jade zaps a wooden crate of dusty record sleeves into her arms, then lowers it to the floor and crosses her legs to flip through them. You can smell the grime that’s settled between them.

     “M’kay, _this_ is the one I want,” Jade chirps. She shimmies the record out from the crowded crate, pushing down the sleeves that try to escape along with it. “This was always one of his favorites. For years and years, this kind of music was the only thing I listened to. It’s out of our time range, but I think it’ll do.”

     Her knees crack as she stands, and you can see the dust on her fingertips when she swipes the [cover](http://tinyurl.com/grylwr9) off. The guy on it looks baby-faced, like he got his photo taken right after getting caught drinking root beer past his bedtime. She slides the record out, placing it delicately on the turntable. The crank protests when she spins it, and she shushes it with her finger to get the record spinning. You’re worried that the tonearm will break off in her hand, but she opts to lift it out of place with her Space powers. The needle sparks green, and there’s a pop of static when the record starts. It wobbles a little, and after a hum of white noise, the [first track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEllHMWkXEU) begins with the quiet thumps of a cymbal and a plucking string.

     The sound quality isn’t great – kind of quiet, actually – but Jade bobs on her heels anyway. She sways airily away, and you watch her continue adjusting her flower pots into perfect lines.

     “Hearing voices helps the flowers grow, so I would always put these records on when I didn’t feel like speaking to them,” she sighs to a pot in the apple row. “Isn’t that right?” It’s not addressed to you. She turns the pots over in her hands, murmuring something softly.

     “You shit-talkin’ me to the greens, Jade?”

     She sticks her tongue out. “I just told you! It helps to talk to them. I played the bass for them, too.”

     “Jade, I get that you’re a witch and all, but you can’t convince me that these plants are gonna start sprouting just by shooting the breeze with them about the weather.”

     “It’s all about the exchange of oxygen, Dave. No witchery involved.” The trumpet rises, and her bangs fall in front of her face as her shoulders sway.

     She whispers something under her breath, patting the soil down the way a parent might tuck their god damned kid in at night. You can’t believe it took you this long to make the connection, but these plants are basically her babies. It’s fucking adorable.

     You float stiffly by the record player, your tail tip flicking about to what sounds like bongos in the recording’s background. Jade jerks her chin up, covering her mouth, then scampers back over to the ancient machine.

     “Ah, but the song I want is up next. We don’t need to be playing serial murder anthems for the little seeds.”

     “I didn’t wanna say anything, but yeah, don’t want a greenhouse full of Audrey II’s….”

     “Let’s see,” Jade murmurs. “It should be the very next one….” She lifts the tonearm delicately, resulting in a blip of static. The record whirs to a halt, and Jade traces her finger along the ridges to the grooves of the second track.

     “First, let’s amplify the sound.” She snaps her fingers, and a long microphone stand clatters to the floor when it materializes. Your neck feathers puff up at the sound. Jade bends the stand closer to the record player’s horn, kicking the long wires out of her way.

     “There, now it’ll play through the speakers. The flowers are bound to enjoy _that_.”

     She lowers the needle again, and you’re surprised when the atrium’s speakers come to life, sputtering a rattling [trumpet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OlDPqYBLw) from above. Now it’s a function. Jade whirls on her heel, and you don’t like the look of the smile on her face.

     “Now! Are you ready to test your moves again?”

     You groan dramatically, which only makes her grin wider. “Haven’t we established that amputee Halloween ghosts have no business flipping out to ill jams ever?”

     “No, come on! You got the hang of it so quickly last time, you know you did, don’t pretend.” Jade tugs at your hands, and your thumbs flinch instinctively to return the grasp.

     Yeah, you know you got the hang of it, you’re just being difficult. If you’re being honest, dancing was fun as hell. The ghost weight of your feet was almost tangible, and it’s a pity no one could see the sick moves you were pulling off in your head. Okay, y’know what, if we’re being _really_ real? It was nice to dance with Jade in particular. There’s a genuineness to her movement, gentle and encouraging, never too pushy. You groan to give her a hard time, but in your head, your feet are already tapping to the tinkling piano.

 

     The baby-faced man on the sleeve glances at you mischievously from his spot atop the record crate. Jade ushers you to the middle of the aisles, the man’s oddly deep voice reverberating from the speakers. But it’s not the fast-paced, wild Renaissance fair slash speakeasy tune that she found on the Prospitian radio, and Jade’s moves slow to match. She keeps her fingers softly linked in yours, avoiding the kinetic ebb and flow of the control deck. You train your eyes on her arms to watch for hints that’ll allow you to follow her lead.

     The trumpet wails a single note, and Jade takes it as her cue to begin. She moves one of your clasped hands upward, then releases your other hand to rest hers on your waist, holding the hem of your shirt loosely. The sound is audible when you suck the air in between your teeth, but you have to mirror the gesture quickly before she registers your surprise. The bottom of her shirt has been screwed up by her apron, and two of your fingers graze the skin. It’s as warm as her hands, no surprise – you’ve realized by now that her temperature really does run high, since for the first few weeks you were certain she was running some kind of trauma-induced fever.

     Clearly, Jade has listened to this album more times than you’re able to guess. She anticipates the dips and arcs before they happen, her shoulders and hips moving to trace the high notes. You catch glimpses of your reflections in the vast windows, how haltingly you move in comparison to her. Your images ripple across the dark of the rainforest, Jade’s excited figure tugging you along the length of the atrium.

     Again you feel the heavy weight of your phantom legs, can almost feel your toes brushing the inside of your sneakers. It’s an eerie sensation, and it’s all you can do not to trip over your own nonexistent two feet. Your weight shifts between your uneven wings as Jade sidesteps.

     Her fingers twitch at your hip with the drawn-out shriek of the tinny trumpet, and you have the impulse to pull her back towards you, but you don’t want to mess up the moves that she’s obviously got in store. Still, the space between you smarts, and you fidget for the closeness.

     A deep drum begins to roll in the recording, and you jolt to awareness when Jade whirls the both of you to the frenetic trumpet’s blares. On the last bash of the war drum, which reverberates through the speakers and makes the flower pots tremble, she releases your hip and swings you away, holding on with one hand. Then the violins come in like an easy listening track at an old folk’s diner, and Jade reels you back in. Your heart pounds from being tossed about unexpectedly, but Jade is grinning wider than before. With both your hands linked again, she moves you two along to the softer strings.

     When you hear the drum start up again, this time you’re prepared for the beat to drop. Jade squeals with surprised laughter as you pull the same stunt on her. You copy the resistant push-pulling of her arms that she did in the control room, looking like you’re both trying to shove the other in opposite directions. The drum rolls as if to announce a winner, and when the trumpet starts screaming again Jade yelps as you let go of her hands and move to swing her in an even circle off her feet. She clings to your neck, startled at how high a legless bird ghost is able to yank someone airborne. Then the baby-faced man starts crooning again, and you set her on her toes.

     Jade’s hair is askew, looking a little redder than before, but you’re content to have proved yourself more than a ragdoll for her to drag about the floor. And to your added delight, she keeps her arms around your neck.

     “See? I told you you could manage,” Jade murmurs. You feel her fingers flex at the back of your neck, and you extend your good wing like a shrug.

     “What can I say, I got the oldies fever,” you retort.

     “I think the Dersite paparazzi will be on _your_ tail next if you’re not careful,” she pretends to huff, clasping her hands together.

     “Let ‘em flash their cameras in my face. Little do they know that I always look amazing and could do with the free headshots to add to my portfolio.” Jade snorts at this, so you add, “No offense Jade, but these moves are so fresh I think they’ll be cropping you out of the cover photos.”

     “You wish! Dersites love to hate me – all the articles will be about how I have two left feet, or how last decade my music tastes are, or how I allegedly dislocated the shoulder of my mysterious houseguest.” She lets go of your neck, removing your hands from her waist by linking them in her own again.

     “I think you did, actually.”

     “Yeah, right!”

     Your face feels like static from how close she is, somehow a different breed from your usual brand of, say, using each other as armrests and footstools. The smell of watered soil and the metal scent of tap water sticks to both of you and stews in your nose, and you feel your eyelids droop with quiet happiness. It isn’t until Jade stops shifting her weight between her feet that you snap out of it, blinking awake again.

     “Dave?”

     “Hm.”

     “The song’s over.”

     The track has whittled into the faint tinny murmur of the trumpet, and now the speakers play only the dead air between now and the next song. Jade gives you a curious look as you clear your throat and separate your fingers from hers, almost agitated with the cool air that works itself between you.

     Over the speakers you hear the needle lift from the record, and Jade glances at you apologetically over her index finger, lined with chartreuse.

     “I’d rather skip this one,” she says simply.

 

     The speakers hum, and outside the windows you hear the din of frogs croaking below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now you know where the fic title comes from, if you didnt already!
> 
> two things:  
> 1) forgot to mention that i went back and added an illustration to chapter 9. check it out!  
> 2) yall better get PÜMPED for that next chapter...... im just sayin >:3c


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> boy oh boy i sure am behind my ideal schedule of updates!! sorry for the wait. hopefully this makes up for it! :3c

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 16 August, 2009

 

     It is already midway through August, and you have no idea how this happened. Each day has seeped like quicksand into the next, coalescing into a sludge that festers in the corners of your eyes and the joints of your fingers, and the price of this timeline’s plodding is that you wake up in the morning (or the midafternoon, or the evening) with a stinging behind your temples and cotton in your mouth and the realization, equal parts disappointment and relief, that _you are still here_.

     Right now, your island in the Pacific would be experiencing the closest thing to a dry season as any island so near the equator is able. The temperature would hover, buzzard-like, in the nineties until the sun sank, at which point you could leave the windows open and enjoy the cool seventy-degree breeze. If you were very unlucky, you would wake up with rain smattering your bedsheets, and you’d have to stumble across the room in your bare feet to shut the panes before the late summer showers soaked your posters.

     You feel you should be taking supplements to make up for lack of sun. Vitamin D, or fish oil, or something with Greek letters and numbers on the label. Just the other day you stood in the showers, staring at your arms under the buzzing lights and wondering, distressed, if you had somehow gotten paler. Nanna has assured you that this is not the case, that the lights in this battleship just wash the color out of things. “Why, look at me,” she said, “I’m as white as a ghost,” which she followed with a dramatic wink. You know you aren’t imagining it. Without the sun’s ascent across the sky and the fluctuating temperatures as your island passes from tropical day to night, you feel unglued from the passing of time. And without your computers telling you the time, you’d fall through the cracks entirely.

     You have no idea how you’re going to keep yourself from going crazy, but one method that’s been tested true is relentless nostalgia. If you know anything from your years of collecting late eighties- to nineties memorabilia, it’s that the past is always better than the present. The benefits you both reap from this coping mechanism, however, are very different.

     For you, remembering the past keeps you grounded in reality, gives you perspective for what and who you’re supposed to be. You grasp onto clear images that jump out from foggy memories, quips from old pesterlogs to ensure that what you remember of your friends has not been warped by time. You scroll ceaselessly through months-old chat logs and read into the night, only vaguely recalling any of your responses. You’re not sure you were awake for much of them. When reading the red and lavender and the cobalt blue makes the tears well and your airway stop up, you click away and flip through your trollslum, reading weeks of all-caps vitriol.

     It makes you feel better to read the vicious things you had to say to some of the trolls, even if you don’t remember typing much of those retorts out, either.

     For Davesprite, nostalgia feeds into his creative juices, once thought to have dried up like a river on Mars. You’re glad that _one_ of you is no longer suffering creator’s block, and it’s a delight to zap piece by tiny piece of DJ equipment into your increasingly junk-strewn room.

     He’s starting to get into it now, murmuring at overlapping windows of studio software whose mixers and sliding bars and drop-down menus make your head spin. You watch with your chin in your arms, kicking your legs and feeling jolts of secondhand excitement when he taps the touchpad of his laptop energetically and nods at a beat he approves of. It makes your veins bubble with warm affection to see him get so excited after being content to lie about and do nothing. But the beats are really nothing new. As you said, his ideas are all remixes of older tunes from the Good Old Days.

     Today, Davesprite is remixing “[Crystalanthemums](https://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/crystalanthemums).”

 

     “I keep tellin’ you Jade, I _can_ -not add a hoover to this track unless you want it to sound like The House on Haunted Hill or some shit,” he says with his back to you.

     “But it’ll sound _hardcore_ ,” you tease back.

     Davesprite turns and flicks between your eyes with his talons, to which you make a scrunched-up face.

     So far, he’s shot down all of your ideas for what to mix this classic track with, including but not limited to:

  1. The main theme from _Back to the Future_
  2. The German _Naruto_ opening
  3. Caramelldansen (met with a reaction that resulted in a two-minute slapfight)



     “I’d add something in to the file while you weren’t looking, but this program has too many _buttons_ ,” you say. You flop onto your back and watch the screen-upside down.

     “That’s because you never upgraded.” The touchpad clicks dully. “Not to mention that this is a pirated version. Nobody really has it. Or, _had_ , I guess.”

     “Why didn’t your brother just buy it? Didn’t he spend his income all willy-nilly anyway?”

     “Willy-nilly is one way to put it.” Davesprite accidentally presses a play button, and you hear what sounds like a wind chime before he pauses it again. “I didn’t want him to know I was using FL Studio.”

     “Wow, hipster.”

     “Yeah.”

 

     Davesprite spent a while shifting through his documents, listening to files with keysmashes for titles to figure out what they were before exing out of them after only a couple seconds. “Crystalanthemums” was hidden in several offshooting branches of folders, abbreviated as “crystal shit ver 4.mp3.” To be fair, you always misspelled it on the first try, too. Both of you gasped loudly when the first notes played through the earbuds draped loosely over his shoulders, and you smacked his forearm excitedly.

     “Oh my gosh, you _have_ to do that one. It’s perfect!” you shouted.

     “Seriously? It took a month just to finish it.”

     “I know that, but if you’re searching for something to remix, I don’t think you’re going to find anything better.”

     “Hey!”

     You snorted. “I mean, you don’t title your files properly. But I don’t either, so it’s fine.”

     “Oh.”

     “Just call it the remastered version.”

     It really did take forever for the two of you to finish this song. The first version you came up with sounded like, in Dave’s words, “some magical girl shit,” but his additions only made that vibe worse. At first it seemed that he was collaborating on this track with you because he wanted it to stop sounding like “the early work of Enya,” but you could tell you’d swayed him as the song only become airier. It was sort of unusual to listen to his edits each time he shot you a link – there was such a disconnect between the music he created and that faltering, metallic-edged face you came to expect from him. Like you had stumbled in upon something not meant for you to see, not because it was a secret, but because you weren’t yet able to understand.

     Exchanging work back and forth like this, just this one track in particular, was like constantly trust falling onto each other and just barely being caught by the arms. Some sort of silent nod of the head was made between you when it was finally deemed “done,” the acknowledgement that you had seen a sliver of the other in a capacity you probably didn’t recognize. Not that you knew it at the time. To you, it was just a really good song. A finished project, a tick off the checklist.

     Davesprite laughed a little and tapped the corner of his keyboard with one talon, the track continuing to play softly. You could hear the bass thrumming between you, and it made you grin wider.

     “All right. ‘Crystalanthemums Episode III: Revenge of the Synth’ is now live.”

 

     You roll onto your stomach again and bury your nose in the bedsheets, warm with the body heat radiating from Davesprite’s electrical tail. The room has acquired a familiar scent all its own, earthy and salty and a bit like the sharp tang of TV screens. You inhale deeply, feeling your bangs fall forward in front of your eyes. When you stretch one of your legs out toward the headboard, your toes touch a long-buried Squiddle. Its plastic eye is cold on your sole.

     Davesprite nudges the side of your head, and you open one eye. His screen is full of unfolding drop-down menus that stretch across the page.

     “You fallin’ asleep on me? ‘Cause this shit’s gonna go in wild directions if you don’t keep us on track. It’ll sound like some nineties Slavic rave jam.”

     “I’m awake.” You brush your hair from your face and prop yourself up with your elbows. “I’m just thinking.”

     “What about.”

     “Do you think we would have still become friends if we weren’t all into music?”

     Davesprite turns away and puffs his cheeks out, letting go of a slow exhale as he considers your question.

     “It was definitely a fortunate fuckin’ coincidence. I don’t think we had anything else in common other than liking video games.” He pauses. “Except for you. Didn’t you think the green guy was Zelda?”

     “I doubt it.”

     “Well, either way.”

     “You still haven’t answered the question, though.”

     Davesprite drums his claws on the keys. “The simple answer? Yeah, I think we woulda still been tight. You don’t have to be slobbering over the same weird kitschy shit to like someone, y’know? Y’all were fun to talk to, even if you _were_ dweebs who didn’t know the difference between Tupac and a two-pack. So I guess I owe you one for lassoing us all together like that.”

     Your heart pangs.

     “You should be thanking the oracle clouds. It wasn’t by chance that I knew how to contact you in the beginning. It was all Skaia.”

     “Gimme an address and I’ll send ‘em a thank you note.”

 

     He knows the bare bones of it, but you don’t think Davesprite will ever get how it felt to watch your friends’ lives unfold across the sky in those early years, only the boy in the other tower providing any context for what another human being felt like. Sometimes you’d watch the eclipse from his room, just kneeling in front of the sill and watching snippets of planet Earth pop and fizzle in the shadows of cumuli. The silky yellow fabric of your gowns would hiss under your fingers as you bobbed in anticipation, gasping aloud at a frosted-over river in the heart of a New York forest, or the blistering Houston sun melting across the windows of a skyscraper. You watched their faces intently, memorizing the little knicks in the blonde boy’s dark skin, how the pretty girl with purple eyes had hair that melted from mousy brown to a blinding platinum white. The air always ballooned in your lungs when you saw the boy in the tower, the boy with the dark, vivid blue eyes so unlike your own. You counted the dark spots on his face, how few they were compared to the freckles that explode across your cheeks and shoulders. He didn’t look anything like you – his skin was lighter than yours, his nose sharp and angled, but your hair was the same inky black, and your eyes had the same rounded shape, always looking at everything with a relaxed, even stare. The trees in his neighborhood were so tall, and his house was so _tiny_ compared to your tower. When you saw John in the clouds, you’d bounce in your sitting position, pointing out the open window and shouting to the boy who was sound asleep.

     “Do you see that? That’s you!” you’d squeal. But then his eyebrows would just twitch in his agitated dreams, and maybe he’d roll over to face the wall.

     It was rare that you ever caught him in the act of scrawling chicken scratch on the patterned wallpaper. The first time you saw him do this, you were certain he was awake, and you put your hand on his shoulder to make him face you. You hugged him tightly, unleashed a torrent of excitement over finally getting to meet him, but his arm kept writing, and he wouldn’t open his eyes to look at you. His breath was even in his sleep, his brow furrowed painfully, and the scowl on his face made your chest hurt. The warmth of his skin felt so strange compared to the cold shells of carapacians, and you realized with a sinking feeling that you had forgotten what human touch was like. You had to peel yourself away, tears stinging in the corners of your eyes.

     If he lived in your tower with you, would he miss the trees on his street? You knew he would miss his dad, or whoever the man was who called himself John’s father. You knew enough to understand that Prospit’s royalty come from the same genetic stew, and John’s dad looked nothing like your grandfather. But what would be the point in disrupting the equilibrium of that pretty life, all autumn leaves and warm fireplaces and living humans? You kept allowing yourself to live that domestic fantasy, imagining as you rounded the twisted corners of the tower’s labyrinth that you were only playing hide-and-seek with your twin, and that you might find him behind any suit of armor. It made the house feel less empty.

     Maybe you could have lived with him. You paste yourself into the images of his home that you’re allowed to see in the clouds. You could have shared the same backyard, seeing who could swing higher than the other, racing each other into the branches of maple trees. You could have grown plants in your windowsill. You could have had the coolest dog in the neighborhood, trying in vain to walk Becquerel down the sidewalk without him teleporting after a squirrel. You could have kept the bedroom door cracked to hear the sounds of your family walking barefoot down the hall, shuffling to the bathroom or to the kitchen for a glass of water. You could have been the twins who wore coordinating outfits to school, carrying little metal lunchboxes with Slimers and Squiddles on them. You could have known what it was like to just be a child.

     And at night, you could have flown across the golden moon together, a secret kept between the two of you.

     You watched your brother’s past and future smatter the Skaian clouds, aching to be a part of it.

 

     “There was nothing in my life I wished for more than to meet all of you,” you murmur.  You let your cheek rest on your forearm. “I suppose I thought all my problems would go away if I wasn’t alone.”

     Davesprite blinks slowly, then sighs through his nostrils and reaches his hand back to rest it on yours. It’s such a soft gesture that the blood doesn’t even heat up behind your cheeks; you just feel a buttery drip of affectionate appreciation that spreads slowly up your arms.

     “Man, we’ve changed so much from being snot-nosed little nine-year-olds, haven’t we.”

     You laugh into the bedsheets. “Good change or bad change?”

     “We’re a straight up mess, but I think we’re still pretty radical.”

     “I think so, too.”

     Davesprite sets his laptop aside at the end of the bed, the fans whirring, muffled, against the sheets. You hear his earbuds fall from his shoulders and clatter against the keyboard. He grunts a little and leans back across the bed, folding his hands over his stomach. His tail flexes like he’s stretching it out.

     “You ever wonder what would happen to us if the game never existed?”

     You push yourself up and turn to look at him, your cheek propped up in your hand. He looks at you with eyelids drooping from fatigue.

     “I’m not sure. I always knew SBURB would happen someday, so I didn’t allow my imagination to deviate from the reality.” Your mouth twitches. “I don’t know. What do _you_ think? Since you didn’t know this would happen?”

     Davesprite looks at the ceiling. “I mean, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Probably the only good thing we got out of it was that we got to meet. Well, most of us met most of us.”

     You inhale sharply.

     “And we know more about our families I guess? That’s good to know. Wouldn’t have wanted to go the rest of my life not knowin’ about secret parents and sisters and shit. That’s some _Lifetime_ nonsense I don’t need.”

     You stare at the sheets, thumbing a patch where Davesprite’s talons have tugged at the stitches. Your glasses slide down your nose, and you scrunch your nose to push them back up.

     “I don’t think I woulda kept making comics, either. If the game didn’t happen. You kinda gotta know when to put a good thing to rest.” He purses his lips. “Maybe – y’know how I was talkin’ about being a good artist if I tried harder?”

     “I remember.”

     “You know what would have been cool? I coulda been one of those guys who draws the illustrations for textbooks. I always thought those were pretty sick. That’s what I could have done.”

     “Wow, something science-related? I thought you were above that.”

     He shrugs. “I mean, I wouldn’t be drawing nucleus diagrams or anything boring like that. Like, those little scenery shots of dinosaurs and stuff? I’d wanna be the person who makes the interpretations of animals who went extinct a fuckton of years ago.”

     “Oh. Yeah, that would be nice. You could draw giant sloths.”

     “Or those whales with little legs still attached.”

     You’re surprised. You thought Davesprite had pinned his entire existence on being a sprite, never allowing himself to consider what he could do outside of SBURB’s programming. As far as you knew, he had stopped thinking about the future. It didn’t make you feel very good, the defeatist attitude he had pulled around himself like a heavy blanket. So it’s a pleasant surprise to hear him talk about this for the first time, and you watch his eyes glitter with warm tenderness.

     Davesprite turns to look at you, and you wipe the sappy smile off your face.

     “What would you have done?” he asks.

     You instantly flounder. “I don’t… I guess I didn’t think about it.”

     “Probably would have grown up to be some sort of physics star, all makin’ Bill Nye culturally irrelevant. Inventin’ the kind of shit that launches us ass-first into the sci-fi future.”

     “Hm. I don’t think so.”

 

     How do you tell him that you didn’t even think you were going to grow up, much less make something of yourself? No one ever told you that your dream self’s mortality was severed from your own. No one ever told you that the stuffed corpse in the yellow skirts up in the attic was stamped with a separate expiration date. You dreaded measuring your height every year, marking with a pencil where you were beginning to resemble your dream self more and more. Her face, lined with small, even stitches, came to match your own as you gained more freckles, your face becoming fuller and more defined. You stared at her closed eyes, glued shut and unseeing, and wondered when it was that you would die. How would it happen? Did you forget how to fly, did a Dersite agent take things too far? The corpse of your dream self had outstretched arms as if welcoming an adoring crowd, and you traced her cold and leathery fingers with your own.

     When your height matched hers, when your hair cascaded down your back at the same length and your dream self was a perfect mirror, you began drafting letters. But you never managed to convey the gratitude you felt for your friends allowing you, for however short a span of years, to be included in the whirlwind of civilization. You weren’t even sure they’d believe you. So you quit trying to write your last words, simply wishing that you could properly say goodbye before whatever happened finally did.

 

     “Space dog got your tongue?”

     “What?”

     “Why so quiet.”

     Your toes uncurl, and you exhale slowly. “I’m trying to answer your question, but I don’t think I can. I think we’re on different pages about this whole ‘hopes and dreams for the future’ thing.”

     “How come.”

     You mull it over. It would be insulting if you told yourself Davesprite didn’t have the capability to understand what you’re about to say, as much as you still want to keep it to yourself. He’s seen the house, he’s seen the tower with its antiques coated in dust. You’ve never said it aloud, and there’s no better candidate than him. So you pull yourself fully upright, the sheets whispering under your legs as you cross them. Davesprite watches you fiddle with your fingers at your lap, considering your words.

     “There was nothing for me outside of that island. I was stranded.”

     He stays quiet.

     “I mean, what was I going to do? I’m sure Bec wouldn’t have let me leave. I would have lived and died on that island.”

     Davesprite tears his eyes off of you and watches the bolted panels of the ceiling, a look on his face something like grief. His rough fingers fidget. A hard lump forms in your throat, and you swallow it painfully.

     You want to say that this game was the only way you could escape, that you had to have everything wrenched away from you just to join the semblance of society. But you don’t think someone who actually grew up with human contact would take this confession well. You lower your face and let your hair shield you.

     “There was no way for me to leave. And eventually you would have all moved on with your lives. I’d be just another one of those online friends that you simply stop talking to one day, and then I’d have nothing left at all.”

     The corner of his mouth twitches, and you’re afraid you’ve said something wrong. You breathe in quickly when Davesprite lurches upright from where he lies, looking at you with an intensity that makes your shoulders twinge. His talons dig into the yellow bedsheets, and you peer back at him through your bangs. In the dim halo cast by the lightbulb hanging above you, you can see the copper bruises of sleeplessness that underline Davesprite’s eyes.

     Embarrassment simmers in the pit of your stomach. It strikes you how insensitive you’ve just been – Davesprite remolded himself to save your life.

     “That would have never happened,” he says lowly. “There is not a single timeline where I would ever allow myself to forget you.”

     Your fingers curl in your lap as Davesprite leans partway across the space between you. You freeze, surprise making your face feel like static. He angles his face towards yours, his hand hovering as if to hold your arm lightly, and you feel a puff of his nervous breath on your jaw. He’s slow and halting, like he’s afraid you’ll vanish under his fingertips if he touches you.

     You remember every night you woke up in the early hours, every instance where he had tugged you toward him in his sleep in the midst of some nightmare to take shelter against your body heat. His cheek pressed to your shoulder, or his lips brushing your collarbone. The realization does not come as a surprise that you are relentlessly bound together, two threads that have become inextricably knotted due to a malfunction in the gut of the sewing machine, and all of this means that you can no longer tell where you end and Davesprite begins. It is not survivor’s guilt or the burden of obligation or even the hunger for human touch that connects you, but a genuine affection, a want to feel out the other’s incomprehensibly foreign life, an insatiable desire to understand it in the context of their own. A slow-burning white dwarf settles itself into your chest, and the warmth of the love you feel pushes out against your ribs.

 

     His eyes are almost closed, still looking at you. You unfold your hands, your fingers numb with buzzing blood, and because it seems like the only sensible course of action, you bridge the gap between you.

 

     Davesprite exhales deeply when you kiss. You aren't pushy about it; you touch your lips to his so softly that his head doesn't even move back. The brief flitter of touch between you is a shock to your system, strange and alien and exciting all at once. You feel you’ve never peeled back enough layers to allow another human so beyond the surface, and there’s a moment of instinctual fear from the recesses of your brain that you’ve made yourself dangerously vulnerable. After what is probably a few seconds, you pull away. Davesprite keeps his eyes shut, his mouth in the same expression you left it, and it's a while before he blinks and looks down at you. When he opens his eyes and you see the soft look of pleasant surprise in them – the quiet alarm that comes when something you’ve wished for very hard has come true despite the impossibility of it all – your fear of what might happen next evaporates.

     He takes the fact that you aren’t fleeing the room at light speed as a sign of approval, and his hesitant hand finally takes your arm up. The air leaves you as he pulls you toward him. You feel the staticy surge of his sprite tail flick and pulse along the skin of your legs, and finally your fingers find a place in the feathers around his neck.

      “Can I? Like, is it okay if I….” Davesprite wavers. Against your arm, you can feel his hand trembling. He’s asking if he can kiss you. You bite the inside of your bottom lip.

     “Your face is super red,” he whispers when you don’t answer right away.

     “It is?”

     “Yeah. Did you wanna stop? ‘Cause I’ll fuck off if you, if you’re not –”

     You interrupt him by pressing your lips against his, firmer this time. Davesprite's chest heaves, and his hands move up to hug you tightly. He doesn't feel the same way you do – his skin is warm, but only in the way that a computer server is when it's been running for a while. Something inhuman buzzes inside of him, and you're not sure you can call his thumping heartbeat a _heartbeat_ at all. Perhaps he senses the difference between you as well, and this is what makes him sure you'll want to stop. He kisses you back hard, like he wants to get the most out of the experience before you inevitably throw yourself back in retreat. But you don't pull away. Your hands move up to feel his electrical blushing, how his skin heats up toward his chest and neck. He shudders at the tracing of your fingertips.

     It feels like this goes on for minutes, cautious and slow because neither of you know what you’re doing. You’re both going off of mental images and remembered scenes from Civilization to figure out how exactly your face is supposed to be angled, or how involved your tongues need to be. But it’s all right this way, because neither of you know when nor if the other might place a hand up in firm defiance to announce that they’ve had enough, and your slow progression suits this. The more time that goes on without such a declaration, the more you cling to each other with confidence. Davesprite snickers into your mouth when a spark of static shock – _real_ static shock, generated from something inside his programmed body that’s gone haywire with nerves – blips between your lips. Your teeth click together lightly after Davesprite plants his hand at the base of your neck, encouraging your face closer to devour every ounce of reciprocation you give him. His hands travel everywhere they’ve only touched while he was asleep or in the most innocent of contexts – your arms, shoulder blades, the small of your back, the crooks where your hips become your legs. Though your eyes are closed, the image your mind conjures for his expression is that of a man left out in the wastelands who’s encountered his first oasis mirage. Or maybe, you think, the water in the pools is real, and he only _thinks_ he will wake up in a pit of sand just like all the others.

     Then the image of the tide pools comes to mind, lying with your legs in the water and letting the sea carry in its colorful pops of living detritus. Warm and ebbing, your body moving with the water but unwilling to resume control of its own cells. It’s not a surrender of will, but a trust that the pools will keep you safe and afloat for as long as you want.

 

     Davesprite's kissing cools in intensity once he realizes you aren't going anywhere, and he pauses to let you both catch your breath. You shiver a bit, your hands hanging loosely on his shoulders. When he pulls his face fully away to brush your hair back and look at you, he only looks tired. The warmth in your chest goes into low tide, and you feel the same familiar melancholy weigh down on your limbs.

     “Are you doing this because you wanted to,” you ask, “or just because you’re sad?”

     Davesprite sighs through his nose.

     “Both.”

     “Oh.”

     “Are you letting me do this because you wanted me to, or are _you_ just sad?”

     “…Both.”

     He pushes his hand through his hair, and the feathers sticking out of it poke through his fingers. You feel your face go numb, bewildered at your own capacity for carelessness.

     “Well, we’re on the same page, then. And I just flushed months of planning down the drain.”

 

     Davesprite flops back down onto the bed, covering his eyes with one hand as he grimaces. You’re afraid you’ve made yourself offensive somehow, and you hide your still-tingling lips behind your fingers. It takes a while to speak through your dry throat.

     “What do you mean? What planning?”

     “You’re gonna think I’m an idiot.”

     “I never think you’re an idiot.”

     Davesprite’s frown deepens, and he uncovers his eyes to look at you. You feel yourself folding inward, shrinking down by pulling your arms around your chest. His sprite tail fidgets across the sheets with pops of digital sound.

     “I spent a lot of time planning to ask you out before this all started. As in, before I even got the game in the mail.”

     You swallow.

     “I’ve got no idea why I thought it’d be a good idea. I mean, what was I gonna do? Make a Club Penguin account and ask you out on a date to the fuckin’ iceberg?” His wings flex underneath him. “But I guess everything seems less impossible once you’re pulled into this hellhole cesspit of a game.”

     He rubs his forehead and scowls at himself, eyebrows knitting together. You feel stuck in place, and you don’t allow even your toes to twitch in your awkwardly splayed kneeling position. Instead, you train your eyes on a bolt on the porthole sill.

     “So after I got the timetables, I would kill time thinkin’ about how I would go about it once I went back to fix everything. I mean, LOHAC is really fuckin’ big, and time travelling makes all the hours stretch out into these weird days and weeks. I’d have super-long lengths of looping time where I wasn’t talking to anyone at all. So I guess it helped me keep my mind off the heat, or the loneliness, or pretty much everything else. It helped me deal with, you know.”

     You know.

     Davesprite squeezes the bridge of his nose. “I thought I had perfected what I would have said. While I was boppin’ around slashing up all these underlings, I would rehearse the same lines over and over. I had it _down_. But I knew that once I went back, I’d be oversteppin’ all kinds of boundaries. I thought that alpha Dave would say something, anyway.” He sighs slowly and stares up ahead. “I guess he never did.”

     You remember with a jolt how awkward Dave was, floundering and hesitant and quick to keep his eyes trained on anything but your face. He always lagged so far behind, searching for frogs in trees so far away that you could barely tell the red of his sleeves from the flowers, and whenever you tried to start talking, he’d let it dwindle and die out quickly enough. You thought that you were doing something wrong, that perhaps the impression you gave wasn’t what he was expecting. Most of all, you were just afraid that it was obvious you hadn’t been living with any other humans, or that holding a face-to-face conversation wasn’t in your skill set. Now you know that it wasn’t you.

     “That’s part of why I never contacted you, once I prototyped. I wouldn’t have known what to say that wasn’t either really aloof or really creepy. Way back when we found out we’d be more or less alone for three years, I thought, maybe….” He grunts to himself and drags his hand down his mouth, holding his chin in his claws. “Man, I don’t know what I’m sayin’. It sounds like I was planning a diamond heist or something. Gatherin’ up the Oceans’ Eleven to pull off the greatest scheme of the century.”

     Davesprite pulls himself upright, his wings unfolding to cover his shoulders like a shawl.

     “I was gonna wait at least a year, since my timeline felt like as much, and I hadn’t _talked_ to you for so long. Like, I felt I needed to get to know you all over again. But I guess I really jumped the gun.”

     “I’m kind of glad you did.”

     Davesprite looks up at you, the whites of his eyes bright in the dim light. His good wing fluffs out a bit.

     “You’re not…?”

     You shake your head.

     “You don’t think that this is… that I’m, like…?”

     You shake your head again, your hair bouncing.

     “No. I’m happy this happened.”

     His throat bobs when he swallows. For a moment you just look at each other, unsure what to do or say next, and in seconds you break out into nervous laughter. He stares blankly at your response, but you keep laughing so hard into your hand that your shoulders tremble. Then he sees the dark tinge in your cheeks, how your laughter is less from embarrassment than it is simple disbelief, and he cracks into a grin himself.

 

     You’re not sure what’s so funny. Objectively, nothing is funny at all, but in what universe would the two of you find yourselves here? The First Guardian girl from an island untouched by man, and the crow specter with binary code running through the neurons in his brain? Nothing is funny, but you are still alive. Nothing is right, and nothing is going according to anyone’s plan, but your days are not meaningless if it means you can make someone else happy.

     You feel a terrible ache yawn inside of you as you look at Davesprite’s face, the last friend you’ll probably ever see before the timeline opens up like a trap door under your feet, and knowing that you are not meant to survive forever in this reality tears you. Would this happen in the alpha timeline? In a world where your brother was alive and you were still the same girl as before, would you still feel the same way you do now?

     Somewhere, an invisible countdown is ticking, and neither of you know when it will hit zero. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now, but you have all the time until then to disregard the consequences.

     Your laughter takes the remaining air out of you, and then you’re back at square one, waiting for something new to happen. You could sit here all night, looking at each other quietly and willing the other to poke through the silence.

 

     “Hey,” he starts after what feels like minutes. “Can I ask you something.”

     “Yeah.”

     “Would it be okay if I kissed you again?”

     Your hand flies to your mouth, and you’re laughing again.

     “Really?”

     Davesprite snorts and wipes his hand under his nose. “Yeah, really. You think I’m kiddin’ here?”

     “No.”

     “You think I’m jokin’ around with you? You think I’m playin’ the wag?”

     You pull your hair in front of your face to hide your smile. “No!”

     “’Cause this shit is dead serious. This is ‘grad school thesis’ serious. This is ‘tell Junior that we didn’t actually set Sparky free on a farm’ serious.”

     “Gee, I’m utterly convinced.”

     “But no, seriously,” Davesprite says. He leans forward and rests his hand on the sheets between you, and to your surprise, your heartbeat slows into a calmer, steadier rhythm. “Would that be cool?”

     The corners of your mouth pull into a small smile. You tilt your forehead towards his, and he squints a little when the curls of your hair brush him.

     “That’d be very cool.”

     The sharp puff of a smothered laugh leaves his mouth, and Davesprite’s lips begin to trace your cheekbone. You pull yourself nearer and return your arms to their resting place around his neck. Davesprite draws you against him. You settle on his lap in response, wrapping your legs around him and feeling the digital sparking of his tail as it loops around the both of you. He seems self-assured now, talons digging into your hips as his mouth travels to the crook of your neck. He draws a small sigh out of you, and you can feel him smiling against your skin.

     You wait and wait for him to build up the courage, and finally he does. Davesprite moves his hands from your waist to cup your face, and his leathery palms are cooler than you thought they’d be. He waits for you to close your eyes, and when you do, he kisses you so softly it’s like he thinks anything harder will snap you in half, or cause you to teleport half a world away, or maybe both. You kiss him back to assure him that you won’t disappear, and his hands soften. He lets them drop to draw your torso flush against his, and your position shifts on the digital surface of Davesprite’s tail, and then before you know it’s happening you’re slipping off of him. You pull him down with you, and his gasp comes out like a squawk.

 

     You’re both laughing as you sweep the fallen hair out of your eyes, and Davesprite rests his hands on either side of your head. His figure blocks out the light bulb that hangs above him, lining him in yellow. Then he extends his wings, and the light goes out entirely. You blink up at him.

     “Your tail doesn’t have very good traction.”

     “My box never said I had kung-fu grip when I arrived in the mail, Jade.”

     “I’ll file a complaint with the programmers. Maybe you could get a software update.”

     Davesprite only snorts at this, and then his mouth is pressed to yours again. You hear the sheets hiss under his arms as he leans closer, his forearms resting on the fabric. His nose nudges the bottom of your glasses, but it’s the only thing you’re able to feel. Your lips have gone numb, maybe from nerves, but mostly from decreased blood flow. You’re not uncomfortable, though – with the sheets underneath you and Davesprite’s uneven wingspan sprawling above you, you feel safely encased. Under the dome, protected from all harm.

     The low bass of the song still plays faintly from Davesprite’s earbuds, which dig into your back from where you’ve fallen on top of them. It’s continued to play with no one listening, and you feel the beat thumping weakly. Davesprite’s laptop screen finally goes idle, and its light sputters to black.

     He pauses, drawing his face away to look at you fully. You try to regain your breath as the temperature in your face returns to normal. His eyebrows furrow together, like he’s awoken from fugue to discover what he’s been doing.

     “Wait. Sorry. I should have asked. Does this? Does this mean… I mean, like,” he flounders. He looks away, his face burning gold. “Are we dating?”

     Somehow, the question surprises you more than the fact that you’ve already kissed. What does that word mean, anyway? You have nothing but TV and movies to provide context, so perhaps your perception of it is skewed. Is it something you need the crucial background of a real childhood to understand?

     “Did you… want to?”

     Davesprite’s eyes dart to the side. He shrugs a little and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

     This gives you no clue as to what any of this will entail. You think you’ll be needing to take puppy steps if you’re going to be any good at this bastion of human communication. But, then, Davesprite has been cut off from society for long enough, too. Perhaps he’s as lost as you.

     You’re sure it’s nothing you can’t learn.

     You look to the ceiling, sighing slowly to regulate the breath that Davesprite has interrupted.

     “I think from the perspective of a totally unbiased observer, we kind of already were.”

     “So, you… we….”

     You’d cover your mouth, but Davesprite’s arms make it a hard task. You laugh openly, and he seems to perk up.

     “Yes, Dave. Add an addendum to the contract to accommodate this new change. Let the record show that this relationship has been upgraded to Relationship with a capital ‘R.’”

     “Signed and fuckin’ initialed,” Davesprite laughs.

     His lips find his way to yours again, and you can feel his smile against yours. Then the boilers kick on below, and the mechanical vibrating masks the song still playing on loop underneath you.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the a.n. where i ask u to please understand that i started studying abroad about a week ago so my progress has been thwarted like a tiny little bug. can you believe i wanted to finish this monster by 4/13
> 
> anyway

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 18 September, 2009

 

     You are Dave Strider, alternatively known as Davesprite. You are half human, half crow, half billions of lines of code. You are one of a handful left of your species. In the game you played, meteors fell from the sky like hail, and your civilization fell to its knees as easily as a house of cards. A new land built from your blood rose out of the ashes, and at the heart of it laid a slumbering giant of magma and rock. You have seen the crumbling of a dead-end timeline, and will perhaps live to see another to come. You have shed your skin so many times that your sense of self is flaked and peeling in your taloned hands. Your best friend is dead, you are as good as dead to your alpha self, your only living relation is separated from you by untold miles of writhing tentacles and the very wall of reality itself, and one month ago you kissed for the first time an omnipotent dog girl who literally holds your life in her hands. Your days are slow, and your nights are invitations to cave in under the weight of guilt. But now, it feels a little more bearable.

     This is not how you expected this journey to go, John’s brutal, fiery death notwithstanding.

     Nothing about your relationship with Jade has really changed all that much, ignoring the fact that you no longer keep a bashful distance between the two of you whenever you’re sleeping. You find yourself drifting towards her absentmindedly, a natural inclination to keep yourselves entwined somehow. Oh, and a good percentage of time spent lounging around staring at walls has been supplanted with macking on each other – but really, wasn’t that a given?

     And at the surface level, you haven’t changed very much, either. You’re not sure what to make of that. It’s not like you were expecting to start barfing glitter and reenacting _The Sound of Music_ once you and Jade started dating, but it’s a little disappointing that you still feel the burning of shame and terror in your gut, hard and charred over like lava. You guess that the imminent decay of your present timeline still outweighs any and all happiness you happen to fall face-first into. All par for the course.

     Jade, on the other hand, has undergone a slight upward tick in disposition. You’re not sure what to make of that, either. You don’t mean to say that she’s seen the light and achieved Inner Peace – she’s not barfing glitter either. Her recent energy is actually unnerving, because it reminds you of someone who’s trying to get their entire bucket list finished before they die of an ultra-rare disease. More specifically, it reminds you of one of your downstairs neighbors when you were younger. He lived alone, you guess, and it always kinda seemed that he had a mental thing. Bro referred to him as “Frigglish,” though you never found out why. Anyway, after several months of seeing him get scragglier and dumpier every time you passed in the hallway or shared an elevator, he started throwing his stuff away. You came home from school one day and saw him tossing a box into a green dumpster flaking with rust, and whatever was inside clattered like silverware. You stopped seeing him after that. When you asked, Bro shrugged and said he moved out. He was part of some doomsday cult, he said, or was just unmedicated and dead-set convinced that the world was going to end soon. So he just dumped all his shit in the trash and fled the coop.

     Your bro might have been fucking with you; he wasn’t social enough to know the apartment gossip.

     Of course, the world _did_ end not too long after the Frigglish incident.

     You see the same spark in her eyes as that old doomsday nut when he was chucking everything into the trash, even if the effect is slightly different since she doesn’t dress like a hobo. But for as much as her behavior tips you off to something roiling away under the surface, it’s kind of sweet how eager she is to yank you both out of bed before four in the afternoon. She’s also convincing you into following her to places you’ve never been before, figuratively and literally.

     The first of which is the Land of Light and Rain.

 

     Rose’s planet is like a brightly-lit scene in a Tim Burton movie – you don’t realize how damn dark the rest of it is until you get a break from the wilting monotones. You really didn’t want to come here, but separation anxiety is a real pain in the ass.

     An immediate sense of wrongness blows across you, partly from the blinding sand and the spectacularly vibrant rainclouds that spit water across the shoreline, but mostly because you feel you’ve invaded private property. It keeps you hovering in place, and you half expect to be stricken down where you float. Trespassers will be shot – survivors will be shot again.

     Jade is close to your ear, and you flinch at her low voice.

     “Listen,” she says. “Do you hear that?”

     Your eyes drift downhill, where a torrent of pink and blue and yellow water is rushing from an opening that gapes under the house. You remember appreciating wryly that the architecture of the Lalonde’s ridiculous modernist home got to persist in its aesthetic even in the Incipisphere. The water froths where it hits the sea, foamy and thick. Around the island upon which Rose’s house perches, the planet’s vast ocean shimmers and refracts like soap bubbles, but the simile your mind immediately conjures is the dirty iridescence of a gasoline puddle.

     “Uh, water?” you falter.

     “No,” replies Jade, shaking her head. “Tune out the water. What do you hear?”

     You strain to hear, not wanting to fail the test, but you can’t trace anything that isn’t the result of LOLAR’s water cycle.

     “Is this a trick question? I don’t hear anything.”

     Jade’s mouth twitches. “No, that’s the answer. This planet has no sound.” She toes the chalky grain that coats the island, turning over anthills of white and digging up nothing. “Look – not even shells are left.”

     Your tail flicks over the chalk, which, disappointingly, feels nothing like flour. You ruffle the top of Jade’s hair, and she gives a canid whine.

     “Not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. We can’t all have tropical islands crawling with freaky ocean critters.”

     “Well, _no_ , but don’t you think it’s a little creepy?”

     The sterility of the planet settles in, and the wrongness feels exacerbated. LOLAR is a floor model beach, giving you the loose idea of what a real shore would be like without the shitting gulls or the sharp seashells puncturing the sand or the stench of crab crap. You may be the only life for miles. A shiver prickles down your spine and dissipates to an electrical twinge in your tail.

     “Yeah. It’s a chiller all right.”

     Jade gives one last concerned look at the soapy sea, bereft of the dolphins and sea serpents she must be used to.

     “Yeah,” she says absently. Then she turns to you and starts to slip down the hill, her footing unsure on the shifting chalk. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

     Your stomach sinks – you were hoping you hadn’t teleported onto this island for any particular reason.

     “You didn’t tell me we were gonna go inside.”

     Jade’s ear flicks. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

     “No.”

     She sighs. “Dave, we’re not robbers or voyeurs or creeps. I just want to clean up the house a little, that’s all.”

     “You wanna… clean Rose’s house.”

     “Is that weird?”

     (Kind of?)

     “Listen – the thought of leaving all that rubble and mess in there is really stressing me out, Dave. Do you think she’d appreciate coming home to a house coated in dust and grime?”

     (Will she get to come home at all?)

     You bob your head noncommittally. It wouldn’t be of much use to tell her that Rose’s room was a fucking mess even before doomed timeline anxiety ate away at her personal habits, and she probably wouldn’t give a shit if her mom’s ugly-ass wizard statues collected dust in the folds of their hokey old robes. Jade steps to continue down the hill, then scampers to slide down the grainy hillside when you give a shrug that says ‘If you must.’ Her ponytail bounces as she regains control of her footing, and again you feel a soap bubble of affection float inside your ribs.

 

     The house looks less like it hosted a human family and more like it was the research headquarters for big-shot scientists studying some kind of –ology. The light reflecting off of the dust makes the white walls gleam brighter, and the wide windows shine pastel. You’ve seen this house on your computer screen countless times, not including when you looked the address up on Google Maps to see what the hell kind of name “Rainbow Falls” was. That probably doesn’t count though, since the satellite image was pixelated as private property on account of the factory located closeby. It’s more imposing in person. You feel an unexplainable nausea stew in your torso, boosting your heartrate into maximum overdrive.

     All right, admittedly, the nausea isn’t unexplainable at all. You feel sick because this house could have been yours, and the rawness in your throat isn’t so much fear as it is envy. You don’t want to see it in person, don’t want to see the place you could’ve called your home if the coordinates on your meteor were tweaked just a bit. But Jade’s already fussing with the front door, too polite to walk right through the wall, so you suck in a deep inhale before she notices you’re still at the top of the hill.

     “I think I’ve just about got it,” Jade murmurs when you float up behind her. “Just have to… _wrench_ the handle a little more.” The shiny silver doorknob protests in her hands. It rattles a bit, something clunking from inside.

     “Jade, you’re the motherfucking Witch of Space. Just walk us on through,” you reply. You start to phase your hand through the doorframe – a perk of spritedom that you rarely utilize because it makes you feel like gelatin – and Jade gasps.

     “Dave! That is breaking and entering!” she scolds.

     “No breaking, just entering.”

     “You’d be breaking Rose’s trust is what you’d be doing,” she huffs. “Here, look. I’ve got it, okay?”

     The white door groans, then grates unpleasantly as it cracks open.

     “See?” she says. “The chalk just settled in the frame is all. It was stuck.”

     You barely hear her. You just stare into the empty house, feeling like white noise. Jade looks at you with her brows furrowed, ears flicking.

     “You want to go in?” she asks quietly. You swallow.

     “After you,” you murmur.

     She gives you a last look, then she pulls the door fully open.

 

     It’s amazing, how the glossy magazines of rich peoples’ houses don’t prepare you for the real thing. The Lalonde’s house hurts to look at – refracting rainbow light ricochets off of every marble-white surface, lending even more to the impression of a sterile research facility. Jade’s steps are muted on one of several Persian rugs, and the patterns of vines and pomegranates are scattered with chalk. It looks like you’ve just come in from the snow.

     The house hasn’t had time to grow the heavy dust of vacancy. Wood cleaner is the strongest smell you can identify, pungent and earthy from the heavy mahogany bookshelves lining the side wall. Like Grandpa Harley’s office, except it’s in the open so you can see how well-read they are, cue eye roll. Beside you is the Cruxtruder, a square of clean hardwood framing it from where something bigger was lifted from place. Oh, yeah, the wizard. You almost forgot about him.

     Jade walks cautiously forward, eyes darting everywhere without knowing where to go first. A newborn calf with dog ears. From your timid spot behind her, you watch the amazement and curiosity reflect in the swivels and perks of her ears.

     “Oh, _wow_ , would you look at that!” she exclaims. “Do you think she’d mind if I looked through these?”

     “Careful, they might be organized by like, longitude of publication city in relation to the coordinates of Alpha Centauri or something.”

     “They need the dust cleared from between them, anyway,” she murmurs. Her naturally soft tone is almost lost under the dull roar of rushing water that thrums under the floor. Jade runs her finger along the closest row of laminated spines, pulling out a volume with embossed lettering. “Look, dust already! I bet they don’t even read any of this.”

     (Didn’t?)

     You keep your eyes downcast before you can catch yourself scanning the rest of the house, focusing on the ground so you’re not disoriented by the open floorplan. The entire first floor is bigger than your entire apartment, and although it’s much smaller than the sprawling tower Jade calls her home, you feel you could easily get separated and lost if you so much as explored a single hallway.

     “ _Opening the Fourth Eye through Alchemical Meditation and Acupuncture_ ,” she reads aloud, “By Orchard Playhough. I wonder what the fourth eye is?”

     “It’s when you fix the broken lens in your glasses.”

     “Ha, ha.”

 

     Jade flips through the pages and sets it back on the shelf, her eyes already wandering again. She trails away from the bookshelf, and you let her walk in circles, turning up objects and making low noises of delight and confusion over the most mundane things. Then, she promptly throws herself onto the couch by the door and yelps when she falls backward, her feet over the top of the cushions and her hair touching the rug.

     “It’s so _soft_!” she cries. “Like, I don’t think this thing is stuffed with horse hair at _all_!”

     “That’s why you won’t catch my ass poppin’ a squat at your house,” you reply, sitting on the ledge of the couch where Jade’s legs hang. “Shit belongs in a museum, propped up on a big ole stand and roped off all velvety so the tykes don’t try to climb on ‘em.”

     Jade stretches out her arms and pats the faded off-white leather, wrinkled from use. Something catches her eye, and she does a half-somersault to right herself. She flips her hair back from in front of her face and examines a black panel in the couch’s arm, slick with tiny buttons.

     “What’s this?” she asks. She presses one, and the bottom of the cushion she kneels on folds out with a mechanical whir. Jade yelps and pulls her legs toward her. You crow with laughter.

     “Jade, you cannot be so goddamned floored by the average suburban house,” you say. “I mean, granted, this house isn’t average or suburban, but it’s a cookie cutter picket fence compared to the Science Nightmare Tower.”

     You choose to ignore the fact that there’s game equipment behind you, standing silent, waiting for SBURB to resume.

     She stretches out one leg and rests it tentatively on the pull-out cushion. “Yes, but _this_ house had an adult in it, and _that_ is a complete game-changer.”

 

     It certainly did.

     When your nose adjusts, it strikes you how _clean_ the house smells. Did your apartment have a smell? Like, other than the rancid reek of sweat and molding food that it developed over the course of your four months? (You threw out everything that was unsalvageable after a few weeks – dumped ‘em in the lava, to be precise – but you couldn’t find anything resembling kitchen wipes. You didn’t think Rose would appreciate you asking for cleaning supplies from her house, either.) And anyway, if your apartment had a smell, you would’ve been used to it. If you had to guess, it would be something like Dorito dust, metal tang, and polyester fibers. God damn, and if everyone smells like their house, then you must have been the grubbiest runt in the school. Bringing an entirely new meaning to _au de toilette_. It’s giving you all kind of messed up feelings to be in a house that seems like a parental figure actually, you don’t know, _took care of it_?

     What would it have been like to live here? Would you still be you?

     Stupid question. Of course not.

 

     You flinch when Jade scrambles over the ledge of the couch and lands on her feet, making a beeline for a side closet off of the kitchen. It opens with a brassy whine, and she disappears behind it.

     “What’re you up to?” you call from the couch.

     “Fetching the bleach!” replies Jade. There’s a sound of plastic containers moving around, echoing inside the tiny space.

     You feel glued to place, but soon enough the eerie feeling of being on camera pulls you upright and pushes you into the kitchen, where you drift around poking at polished, white cabinet doors above the sink.

     “Smells like old crackers in here,” you murmur. You peek inside a cabinet that contains nothing but gold-edged plates and bowls, shiny porcelain mugs hanging from revolving hooks. Not a single plastic bag of paper plates in sight. One of the bowls has been shaken out of place by the explosion that rattled the house, and you push it back into place.

     A disorganized row of wine bottles with embossed labels populates the counter, their reflections blurry on the marble. You trace your claw along the gold grapevines of a bottle with Italian – or Spanish? It could be Spanish – writing. Through the maroon glass, you can see that not much remains inside.

     You smell the sharp, radioactive buzz of the Green Sun, and Jade sighs out in the hall.

     “She’s scattered all this stuff throughout the house!” she says. “Why not keep it in one place? It’s like she was prepared to start a cleaning spree no matter where she happened to be.”

     “Judging by how Rose talked about her, that’s probably not a bad guess.” You thumb the cork of a sleek, black bottle. “Your grandpa did the same thing with those fuckin’… knights and mummies ‘n shit.”

     “That had its aesthetic purpose. This does not.”

     The door groans shut, and Jade pokes her head into the kitchen doorway.

     “Are you planning to help, or are you just trolling for food?”

     “You don’t want me to help, I don’t know how to clean.”

     Jade shakes her head. “You also didn’t know how to _shoot_ , how to _dance_ , how to _garden_ ….”

     “Okay, point taken. The idea of dusting just makes me want to pluck out all my feathers one by one.”

     “Well, it’ll make _me_ feel better. So just try not to break anything.”

     She turns to leave, toting an arsenal of Swiffers behind her. The clattering sound of plastic echoes into the high rafters, and you hear Jade humming lowly as she disappears behind the staircase. Only thin strips of her can be seen through the planks. You sigh through your nostrils, uncomfortable and out of place but unwilling to ask to leave, and so you sit yourself on the counter across from the refrigerator.

     And then you see the greatest thing you’ve ever laid eyes on. Hanging across from you is the shittiest, most jpeg-garbled piece of shit wizard to torment an innocent photo printer by producing its atrocious visage.

     Not only is this unholy abomination encased in what appears to be a high-grade, luxury-quality frame the likes of which you’d only see in Versailles, the surface it’s printed on is legit canvas. The fuzzing of the artifacts around his beard make the wizard look like he’s got a parasitic cloud leeching off his face, and the knowing twinkle in his eyes just resembles a cataract. The owl on his shoulder you mistake for a faux fur shawl. As for his robes and the nebulous contents of his crystal ball, it’s all a swill of of uneven pixels.

     What makes him bring an astonished tear to your eye isn’t that you’ve never noticed him before – he was on your screen as Rose’s server player, of course – but you were certain the quality would be higher in person. With how much the WiFi was shorting out for both of you, you figured the distorted blotch of artifacts above the counter was the result of low screen resolution. The fact that he lives up to his awful glory in real life is unbelievable, unfathomable. She’d never be able to host a single respectable dinner party, no matter how sleek and stylish the rest of the house was.

     You are absolutely under this bastard’s spell.

     You start to call Jade in here so she can participate in gazing upon this masterpiece, and as your head is in mid-turn you gasp aloud. You’re certain this house will send you into shock if it keeps hurdling aesthetic surprises your way, because welded to the fucking freezer door is the post-modernist work of the generation.

     The frame is thicker than the crinkled piece of printer paper behind its glass, carved with silver, curling leaves and flower petals. It shines under the pops of pastel that reach this far corner of the first floor, and you guess it was meant to look like it was part of the fridge. And within this ornate piece of art is a drawing by a four-year-old Rose.

     Forget every shitty puppet and/or poster that your bro kept in your apartment. Forget every claim he had to being any sort of ironic connoisseur. Rose’s mom would have left him in the dirt, would have stomped him into the ground with one black stiletto heel. This isn’t to say you think any of this is ironic – you never bought into Rose’s griping over her mother’s passive aggressive stunts. Someone so willing to spend thousands of dollars on artifact-littered wizard canvases and custom frames for children’s drawings can’t be anything other than heart-wrenchingly sincere, and somehow the obvious weight of her genuineness surpasses your brother’s irony by a longshot. And in front of you is the proof.

     You smack your hand to your mouth to keep from laughing. Jaspers has four stick legs in this drawing, his mouth an uneven W, his name spelled in a script that meanders across the top of the page. In some strange way, he looks about as mischievous as he does as a sprite. You can see the hardwood pattern under the crayon from where she sat drawing it on the floor. Young Rose’s script is hard to read, letters switched around and written in different sizes. Looks like a poem she wrote for her demonic, human-hunting gremlin of a feline:

 _Jaspers is a handsome cat, in his tie and in his slaks_  
         _He gose down to the Kitty stashun to see if he can buy more Fashun,_  
_And comes home instead with fillay of Rat_

     Nice in-line rhyme.

     A heavy weight settles in your chest, an urge to both laugh and cry. Any exclamation will do, as long as it’s loud and obnoxious and full of unnecessary emotion. You deeply, deeply wish your sister was here.

     It was your last plan to start inserting yourself into the hypothetical framework of the Lalonde family, but it’s too late to go back now. What must it have been like to have a guardian who _cared_ so damn much about anything at all? You could have had your first MSPaint comics framed over the fucking fireplace, for Christ’s sake. She probably would’ve mailed them to every children’s magazine art gallery within a thousand-mile radius. You want to go back in time again and shake Rose by the shoulders, plead for her to understand how good she had it.

     Just to see how heavy the whole thing is, you yank the freezer door back and feel your muscles groan when it’s unsurprisingly difficult. A blast of cold air hits your face, and you close it again after you catch a glimpse of margarita mix and long-expired Ben & Jerry’s.

     You sniff loudly to contain the sting in your eyes, wipe your leathery hand under your nose and let your eyes trail down. A cluster of plastic magnets on the fridge spells out an insult to the lady of the house, and despite your wanting to leave the house as is, you scramble them up until they’re unreadable. You’re sure Rose wouldn’t want to be reminded of it.

 

     Silence from the front of the house.

     “Jade?” you ask the open space. “Give up already?”

     The sound of a sitting chair groaning under shifting weight. Jade’s ears reappear over the planks of the staircase, curious and pointed, and you can see from where you float how wide her eyes are.

     “Come here,” she says quietly. “I found something.”

     A nervous chill spikes your chest. “What’s ‘something?’”

     Jade pushes herself up, the house shoes she wore because “it’d be rude not to” shuffling on the floor. She has something in her hands that glints pink and yellow, but you can’t tell what it is. It disappears from view when she reenters the living room and lowers herself on the couch. Then she looks up at you with the face that would work perfectly if she were asking for donations to an animal shelter on TV, and you take it as a sign to join her. You coast over the counter and into the small space the couch forms, settling carefully beside her.

     “What’d you pilfer from the chest?” you ask, voice cracking. She doesn’t smile.

     “Just look at it.”

     The picture unfurls slowly as she takes her hands away. Resting on her legs is a delicate silver frame, nothing fancy, nothing like the Baroque ornamentation you’ve come to expect from the house’s interior. She holds it up for you to see, and you feel a great weight push on your chest, threatening to leave a permanent crater. Grief tackles head-on the wonder and affection you feel in the next moment.

     It’s a photo of Rose and her mother. A photo of your sister and your mother.

     Rose can’t be older than eight in this picture. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, and the pout on her face is so _her_ that you want to cry. Her sweater is black to match her mother’s outfit, and it gives the impression that they’re fused together. You can’t tear your eyes away; you desperately didn’t want to know what she looked like, but now that you do, you can’t stop pinpointing similarities. The slant of her eyebrows, the angle of her jaw and the shape of her nose – all little fragments of your own face. Your brother didn’t look much like you at all, so little that he sometimes introduced you as “the foster kid.” His skin was closer to Rose’s color, his hair straight and light. He looked like the Pokémon evolution of yourself if you were given a Snapbackstone, all sharp edges and ninety degree angles even though you never saw the guy touch an iron. On the other hand, you would have blended perfectly into this family. You wonder what you would have been forced to wear for this photo. Probably a sweater vest and tie, the whole shebang, making your mother the only one smiling between her two stuffily-dressed children.

     Man, you would have dressed like a complete tool.

     “She looks so familiar,” Jade murmurs. You don’t think she’s addressing you directly. Her brow is furrowed as she stares at the woman in black, struggling to pin where she’s seen her before. Probably just the Oracle clouds – she must not remember.

     “Can I…?” you start. Jade blinks and hands the frame over, your fingers brushing. When you feel the frown deepen on your face, she adjusts herself so that her knee just grazes your tail.

     Your hands tremble under the velvet backing. The backdrop of whatever photo studio this was taken in is a misty gray, a sharp contrast that suggests a vacuum, inviting something else into focus. You blink hard, squeezing your eyes shut and handing it back to Jade without looking at her. There’s the faint sound of her placing it beside her, and then her hand is on your shoulder. She doesn’t say anything, just keeps her warm palm there, and after a moment you remove it so you can lean against her. Jade settles her head in the crook of your neck, and for a while you listen to the refrigerator grumble in the next room.

     “The game can’t do this _Star Wars_ shit to us,” you say once you’re sure your voice won’t crumble. “We shouldn’t have been split up.”

     You almost tack on that  _this isn’t fair_ , but what is fair? Would what happened to you be _fair_ if you lived in a different time zone with a different family? Would it have hurt less?

     “I know,” replies Jade. Her voice is a whisper, and you can feel her small exhales on your collarbone. You swallow and press your cheek against her hair.

     “I should’ve been here,” you murmur. “It isn’t right.”

     Jade adjusts where her cheek rests on your shoulder. “You mean you don’t want to have lived where you did?”

     Fuck. Is that you mean?

     You don’t want to have switched places – Rose’s persona wouldn’t have benefitted from Bro pushing her around on rooftops and making her the object of guerilla puppet warfare tactics. She’d have constantly fucked up makeup from being ambushed while applying eyeliner, hiding under beanies after the first time he sabotaged her flatiron. The gothest little twerp to ever walk in the Houston sun without melting under layers of black. But at the same time, you don’t want her to have lived with you where you did. The apartment was cramped enough with just two residents, and you would’ve fainted if your bro ever made a horrorterror Smuppet, a beard of tentacles instead of bulbous polyester noses. For all you know, she would’ve taken some bizarre enjoyment in his mind games and participated in them herself. If that’d happened, you’re sure you’d run away at age ten, a bandana full of apple juice bottles tied to a bar of scrap metal. It disturbs you, the possibility you’re admitting to yourself that if you had had the chance, you would’ve left Bro to himself, free to clutter his own space with porn puppets and not worry about raising a child.

     But there’s always the blood sinking into the dirt, the sword lodged through his chest, the absence of any real incentive to fight Jack Noir other than the instinctual knowing that he might go after you. You always knew that Rose’s mother must’ve loved her. Is it possible he cared for you as well, even if he didn’t weld your drawings to the freezer door?

     Well, maybe he fought Jack because all he knew how to do was skewer things with shitty katanas.

     “I don’t know what I mean,” you sigh.

     A grandfather clock in some distant hall gongs the hour, and it echoes faintly through the first floor. Quickly enough, it’s swallowed in the sea’s gushing under the floor.

     “It’s okay,” she says. “I understood what you meant.”

     Absentmindedly, you squeeze Jade’s hand, and one of her dog ears brushes the side of your head.

     “I loved my home, and I loved how unique it was. I knew Bec would keep me safe, and I knew I had another home to go to in my sleep, but it’s not… it wasn’t enough,” she murmurs. “Even if he had just woken up on Prospit, that would’ve sufficed.”

     That would’ve sufficed. You think of Rose’s first pointed message telling you to leave the LOLAR gate alone, that she didn’t want anyone in the house. You don’t know why, and you still don’t. You’d call her for advice in the middle of one of LOHAC’s convoluted quests only for her to answer on the last ring, curled up and cotton-headed with her face resting in Jaspers’ fur to ease the most recent hangover. Maybe, at first, she just wanted time to mull over your new situation. And then, _maybe_ , she just didn’t want you to see the bottles she couldn’t be bothered to dispose of. Derse would suffice, she said.

     You sat at the sill while she tore apart notebooks explaining her latest conspiracy theories, dragged her from Dersite belltower windows whenever she disappeared from her room, throwing the duvet over her while her Babylonian serpent-speak fizzled into feverish whispers. The longer she stayed asleep, the more she was drawn to the inky black beyond the city, and the more you felt her slip away, the last human alive beside yourself. You needed each other where the Furthest Ring didn’t creep into your subconscious, make you moody and impulsive parodies of yourselves. Derse did not, could never suffice.

     But John is not Rose, and Prospit is not Derse. Maybe it would’ve worked for the children of the golden moon.

     “We should sue Skaia for emotional distress,” you mumble into Jade’s curls. “Wring that fucker dry for every boonie it’s got.”

     “I don’t think there’s a single lawyer in paradox space who could win a lawsuit against all of creative potential,” replies Jade. “But if you’re okay with the media circus, I’d be okay with trying.”

     “Find your best blazer, we’re seeing that blue piece of shit in court.”

     Jade lifts her face away, and the draft of the empty house feels colder contrasted with her overly-warm skin. She picks the frame up again and brushes the specks of dust from its glass, wiping it clean with the hem of her shirt. You look away as she vanishes it to whichever shelf she plucked it from. The twinge of teleportation’s residue tingles in your nose. Then she’s standing again, and you feel so heavy that it’s a while before you turn back to watch her.

     “Sorry for the distraction,” she says with her back to you. The Swiffer is back in her hands, an amorphous blob of floating Persian rugs drifting through the air and out of her way. “I think I’ll actually start up, now.”

     She starts to turn, but then her ears perk up with a question. “Oh, by the way.”

     “What.”

     She points to the staircase, toward a massive column with a bronze vacuum placed on top. The plaque is too far away for you to read, but you can see its cable winding around the pedestal and into the dark.

     “Is that normal?” she asks.

     “No,” you respond. “No, it really isn’t.”

 

     You end up not being of much use.

     Each time Jade presents you with a feather duster, you end up skimming the bookshelves and shaking snow globes with little warlocks inside instead of cleaning them. Then, inevitably, she takes it away with a quiet exhale and dusts it all away herself. At one point you end up laying backwards across a hall chair, flipping through a coffee table book about Paris while Jade beats the curtains of their debris.

     “Why don’t you just zap all the dust outside?” you ask.

     “I should stop giving you the impression that feats like that are easy for me,” she replies. “Besides, it’s less personal. I like doing it this way. It’s like I’m doing her a favor.”

     You turn the page to a full-spread panorama of the Arc de Triomphe. A motion blur of buzzing tourists lines the sidewalk, indistinct jackets and umbrellas and bags.

     “Hm.”

     “I thought you wouldn’t be in any rush to leave now that you’re settled,” she teases.

     “I’m not.”

     “Then be glad I’m doing this the hard way.”

     You squawk when Jade appears beside you and whaps you on the head with the feather duster. You try to grab it from her, but she lifts it above you and disappears around the corner. Your quest for revenge takes you twice around the first floor, looping through guest rooms and unused sitting areas, and ends when you manage to get her across the back of the head with a dish towel that was hanging from the oven. She shields herself from further onslaught behind the closet door, and after a clatter and a thump she comes back out with a bulky vacuum cleaner, the tangled cord wrapped in her hand like a lasso. You raise your arms in surrender.

     “Stand back, villain,” says Jade, aiming the opening at you. “No, really, stand back. I need to lug this upstairs.”

     You lower your arms and sweep them behind you. “After you.”

     The planks thunk under Jade’s slippers. Each step is held up by stilts, a precarious arrangement. It makes you kind of nervous that there’s no handrail, even if there’s no risk of toppling over the side. Jade turns to look at you, and you have to stop yourself from sounding like a dweeb and telling her to watch where she’s walking.

     “Hey, do you know how these things work?” she asks. You blink back at her.

     “Uh, no. I don’t have a fucking clue.”

     “What, you’ve never even seen someone use one?”

     “Like, besides TV…?”

     “Yes, besides TV!” She reaches the top of the stairs and sets the vacuum down. The wires patter against each other as they fall in a pile. “I’m sure it can’t be _that_ hard.”

     “No. I mean, like, I guess not?”

     “It can’t, can it?”

     “No, probably not.”

     “Probably not?”

     “Probably.”

     You stare at each other.

     “I’ve never seen my brother lift a hand to clean anything in our apartment,” you say. “It took me like, five years to get the laundry ritual down. I’m not gonna be of any help.”

     You don’t know why you’re embarrassed. Jade _said_ that her hellhound didn’t let her dust her house, either. It’s just a little humiliating that she was able to keep an entire skyscraper from falling into disrepair, while you never saw your kitchen counter be graced with the disinfecting miracle of Clorox.

     Jade exhales through her nose, her ears flattening against her head. “Let this be our first lesson in how the American family manages the cleanliness of their household.”

 

     Again, her lesson. You do a lousy job of contributing.

     The halls upstairs are long and white, largely undecorated so that walking down them feels like a trip to the Met. The vacuum hitches several times on some of the hall rugs, and Jade’s grumbling as she yanks things out of the intake port is the background noise to your contemplation of fine art – i.e. pixelated wizard portraits.

     “Absolutely superb composition in this piece,” you mutter to yourself in your best posh accent. “The linear flow from the wizard’s magnificent staff to the arch of the owl’s wing brings to mind Grimsley Jackoffby’s 1967 exhibition in San Francisco. Fantastic choice of oils here, I don’t think acrylics could quite achieve the same level of refined slavishness.”

     Jade straightens up from the end of the hall, and the vacuum burps up the tassels of a hall rug.

     “What about a ‘magnificent staff?’” she jokes.

     “Like, a magic staff.”

     She smacks both of her hands to her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

     “As in, wizardly business.”

     “If you say so,” she says between her fingers. “Take pictures while you can, because none of these magnificent staffs are coming back with us.”

     “No flash photography in museums, Jade. Duh.”

     Satisfied that the rug has been cleared of all dust, tracked-in chalk, and/or deeply ingrained cat hair, Jade kills the vacuum. Its rumbling roar sputters out. She toes the corners of the rug to smooth out the wrinkles.

     “Well, the halls are done,” she sighs. “Rose must’ve run all over the house to track all this chalk everywhere.”

     “Or maybe the imps had a coke party we weren’t invited to.”

     Jade snorts in the way that tells you she can’t be bothered to come up with a clever response. She stands the vacuum up straight, attempting to wrap the cable around it before giving up and letting the plug clack against the hardwood. Brushing her hands off on her pants, she peers into the door beside her. It’s cracked a bit, and a narrow strip of light pokes into the dim hallway.

     “Oh, my,” she murmurs.

     Her tone throws you. You half expect her to have found a Zazzerpan made of wine bottles, or the largest sprite-produced hairball known to paradox space. She keeps her hand raised halfway to her mouth, stuck in mid-step, and your chest clenches.

     “What is it.”

     “Hey Dave…”

     “What? You’re creeping me out.”

     “Would you judge me if I went into Rose’s room?”

     Oh fucking my, indeed.

     You drift over and hover above Jade so you can see past her.

     “I mean, I’m sure she’d be pissed at us forever….” you start.

     Jade places her hand on the doorknob.

     “Like, girl gives you the glacial shoulder if you so much as flip through her notepads without signed and notarized consent….”

     You push the door slightly forward, and the hinges whine.

     “Y’know, it’s like, we’ve already been all over her house without tellin’ her, anyway….”

     Jade steps over the threshold, the brilliant light of LOLAR dazzling off the lenses of her glasses.

     “And we have good intentions and all, tryin’ to keep her house from getting all crusty, so really she should be thanking us….”

     And now you’re both in Rose’s room.

 

     It’s eerie to see it without its shades of deep violet – this version is like the Premium Chrome edition, bleached thoroughly to remove all pigment. You wonder what the Lalonde’s had against painting their rooms anything other than white. The light washes out the meows, makes them a faint lavender that’s barely conspicuous. But then you realize the brightness of the room isn’t just from the paint job – it’s also because a flood of the planet’s light is pouring in from a gaping hole in the wall. You gawk at where rubble and plaster litter her tangled bedsheets, dusting the mess of yarn and half-finished knitting projects.

     “What the fuck happened here?”

     “John crashed the party,” Jade sighs. “He flew through LOLAR’s gate and landed in here. He was telling me about it before… wanted to know if we could rebuild it somehow. He knew Rose wouldn’t want to come back to this.” She pauses in front of the writing desk and swipes her finger along the edge, rubbing chalky debris between her thumb and index.

     Here is where your two paths splintered apart. Instead of wrecking your timeline, John wrecked your sister’s room. That blue little fucker can’t do anything without leaving a temporal and/or material streak of collateral damage behind him. Your ribs ache.

     “This I can fix, though,” she says. “I don’t know much about architecture, but I can at least make this place habitable again.”

     Jade lifts her hands, and their crackling chartreuse is lost in the intense light that streams directly across her face. Like the shards of glass in the atrium, a million billion trillion pieces of dust rise up in a nebula. Jade cups her hands upward towards her mouth and pretends to blow the cloud away like dandelion seeds, and in seconds the room is clear of its rubble. What’s left is a jagged line of infrastructure around the point of impact, thin bits of metal poking from the wall, tufts of pink insulation blowing in the breeze.

     “Nice view,” you murmur.

     “I can hang up a curtain, I suppose,” muses Jade. She taps her chin, gazing out over the twisting yellow clouds that trundle across the sky. “I’d hate for her books to get ruined.”

     Your tail flicks whenever it glances the carpet, somehow sure that touching anything will trigger security measures and you’ll be bagged like a turkey in some cartoonish fishnet. Posters are tacked to the wall, drawings done in colored pencil on pieces of huge sketch paper. All obscured by that single line of code, sometimes messy where a sleeping Rose bumped into a bookshelf during her unconscious scribbling. Some of her darker posters of eldritch terrors make the purple marks disappear, only visible if you tilt your head a certain way. The books seem to be the only organized part of the room. They’re arranged by height, stout little dictionaries and pocket guides leading up to hand-width volumes about French literature and world religion. You snort under your breath when you find a snakeskin copy of the _Necronomicon_ between an encyclopedia of cat breeds and a book of Europe’s most haunted cathedrals. With no room left on this shelf, Rose has filled the space at the end with a Beanie Baby dragon, its tongue lolling out.

     You bend down to touch the translucent strings of a violin propped between the shelves and the wall, its bow hidden under a hoodie that’s been tossed on the ground. Cautiously, you pluck a string with one talon. It produces a single, reverberating chirp, and the noise startles you. You turn back to see if Jade’s noticed you snooping.

     She has her back to you. Jade stands by the bookshelf by the door, her head bent over one of the volumes. You hear her flip the book shut, and then it disappears into her sylladex.

     “Stealing from the library?” you ask. Her shoulders jump, and she looks back at you bashfully.

     “I’ll be sure to put them back – she won’t even know!” she sputters. “I’ve read everything in my house a hundred times, she won’t curse me with black magic if I pick some things here and there.”

     “Are you swiping books banned by the Catholic Church about how to send your boyfriend to the shadow realm.”

     “Yes, and the tutorials are surprisingly easy. I just have to wait until the moon passes into Aquarius.”

     “‘If you can’t directly access the hellish flames of the Green Sun, store bought is fine.’”

     Jade clucks at you and straightens out Rose’s bedsheets, tucking the ends into the footboard. A loose knitting needle falls to the floor, and you wonder how she didn’t wake up every morning with the indents of them jabbing into her legs. Always so busy composing her words that there was no executive function left to keep her room in manageable condition.

     “There,” she says. “That was bothering me.”

     “I can count the time I’ve seen you make a bed on one hand.”

     “Well, at least one of us gets to have neat sheets.”

 

     At what would be sunset, you unwind in the Lalonde’s household bar.

     An errant meteor just before Rose entered the game has blasted away half the bar. A stray raincloud barely misses what is now a balcony, and you hear rain patter on the other side of the house. You lay stomach-down on the tile to let the light warm your wings, feathers flexing to soak up the warmth. Your arms rest on a transportalizer that is now defunct – its Point B inaccessible through the fourth wall – and you’re so numb to the presence of these pads that you didn’t even question why it was there. It’s incredible how SBURB allows you to suspend your disbelief to gravity-defying heights.

     Jade’s heel thumps against the counter as she swings her leg. There’s the clinking of glass and ice from where she sits, and you turn your head from its resting place on your arms. The sleek, glassy counter of the Lalonde’s bar has only been minimally scuffed by the fallout – nothing but the best material for the purpose of getting schwasted in the middle of nowhere. The reflection of Jade’s leg is hazy in the frosted surface. You blink at the light that refracts off the rim of a whiskey glass in her hand.

     “You think an ogre’s gonna come up here and card us?” you ask.

     Jade looks down at where you sprawl on the tile. “Does this bother you?”

     Shit, you don’t know, it isn’t like you didn’t have to smell Rose’s alcohol-stained breath every time she got so much as two feet away from you. You chew the inside of your mouth.

     “I’m just wondering why you’re taking an interest in the sauce is all. Gotta squash that shit before it becomes a nuisance. Call me the Prohibition police, bustin’ into the speakeasy with my big ole badge and douchey fedora.”

     Jade takes a sip and lets the glass rest on her leg. “My grandpa had this huge cabinet in the back of his office that had rows and rows of bottles in them. The kind of stuff that smells like wood varnish, you know? I barely ever saw him open it.” She swirls the ice once and peers into the bottom of the amber liquid. “I only asked him what it was once. He told me it was poison, so I shouldn’t drink it.”

     High tide crashes on the edges of the island outside.

     “I was always curious why he would keep poison in his office. It didn’t take me too long to figure out what it actually was, but I used to think about what he said a lot. You know, since I thought he. Hm.”

     Jade looks away and eyes the doorknob with unusual interest.

     “I just wanted to see if it tasted like varnish after all,” she finishes.

     “Does it?”

     She takes a quick gulp out of the glass, so much that only a bit remains when she’s finished. The ice clicks together when she sets it next to the bottle it came from.

     “It’s not terrible.”

     “Didn’t seem like it. You’re drinking it like a hardened lumberjack with six fingers.”

     Jade laughs and flexes her toes, stretching her legs in front of her. “Dave, I’ve inhaled gunpowder and handled radioactive waste nearly every day of my life. Liquor is going to have to step up its game if it wants to affect me.” She massages her chest and makes a face. “I don’t even feel anything.”

     “Sure.”

     “Did you want any?”

     You feel your wings flinch involuntarily. “No, better not. I think I might have a genetic inclination towards the spirits that would not benefit my state of mind whatsoever.”

     You would also like to smack the glass out of her hands and throw every surviving bottle into the sea, but you don’t want to sound pushy.

     Jade’s cheeks seem to darken. She fidgets with the empty glass and slides it away to the end of the counter, coasting on its own trail of condensation.

     “Did you still want to break all these bottles? This would be the best time to do it. You could blame it on the meteors.”

     Your heart jolts.

     “Probably not a good idea. If we pollute Cetus’ ocean she might lug herself ashore and flop around in a hungover rage like a low-budget Godzilla monster. Look at her just right and you can see the puppet strings movin’ her wings around.” Your tail stretches on the floor, and it flicks in the warm air that comes in. “At least, I think she has wings. Don’t know why you’d need ‘em if you live in the ocean, but hey, SBURB works in mysterious ways.”

     Jade closes her eyes. “Cetus looks almost like a sea slug. The way their cerata look like wings? She reminds me of a _Glaucus atlanticus_ … from pictures, anyway. They didn’t live close enough to wash up in the tide pools. Oh! I did find a Gold-spotted _Chromodoris_ once – _that_ was amazing. It looked like it had rabbit ears.” She crosses her ankles.

     “You spyin’ on her right now? Or you just see her in your little crystal ball things?”

     She puts a finger to her lips and smiles at you. “I’m spying. She’s sound asleep, though. I think we’ll be fine.”

     “Famous last words.”

     “Echidna, though… I really don’t know how to describe her.”

     “Sounds like a Sonic OC gone wrong from the statues I’ve seen of her. Original character do not steal.”

     Jade runs her hand through her hair, and for a moment it blots out the light that reflects off a raincloud. “She’d turn you into an ice sculpture if she heard you say that.”

     “Sweet. Always been a life goal of mine to be immortalized in art.”

     “Except there’s no immortalization involved, because after you’re frozen she’d knock you into a lava pit with her tail.”

     “Oh shit, both of our denizens got lava pits?” You extend your good wing and flex its primaries are far as they’ll go. “That figures. Air five for hellhole-dwelling browser monsters.”

     She leans forward and smacks the air between you with her palm. “Air five.”

     “Did she ever tell you that you that our quests were like, weirdly connected? Hephaestus nearly wasted me every time I saw him. Like, ‘Forge’ this, ‘Forge’ that. I’m like, ‘Dude, chill. I know you must have one hell of a magma fetish but there’s nothing I can do to help you. The lava is right there. Like, go get it. You’re surrounded in it.’”

     “It was briefly mentioned in our terms of agreement, yes.”

     “Man, such a relief when this version of Hephaestus cut me some fuckin’ slack. Not that the Forge made him all doe-eyed, but it was nice to get on with the quest and tick a box off the ole to-do list while Dave was like… I don’t know, tripping over nakodiles and falling asleep.”

     “Hey! That’s my gig.”

     “I know. Inconvenient naps are copyrighted to you alone, you should send a cease and desist letter.”

     “Echidna can be the prosecutor.” Jade stretches her arms behind her and looks out the hole in the ceiling. “She was very thorough with our agreement. I think she was probably the most diplomatic of our denizens.”

     “Mine could’ve picked up some pointers from her, then.” The rain runs through the gutter and sputters out just outside the bar, a tiny stream of multicolored water. “Guy was absolutely ornery. Demanding his fuckin’ volcano with man-child baby hands. It ain’t even yours, my dude.”

     “It’s more like she’s leasing it out to him, yeah.”

     “Our denizens are like middle-aged divorcees fighting over who gets the Porsche.”

     “It was nice that I didn’t have to fight her, though.” Her heel bumps the counter dully. “Even if I had to lie to get her to stoke the Forge. I was certain she’d call my bluff and impale me on an icicle.”

     “God, yeah. The _Choice_. Bullshittiest catch-22 in the game.”

     “What was yours, again? Did you ever tell me?”

     The end of your tail spasms. “Had to fix a sword. I dunno. Important Plot Shit.”

     “No, I remember the sword. You told me about that.”

     Jadesprite’s memories must be seeping in little by little.

     “What was the alternative?” she continues.

     You tuck your face back into your arms, your mouth twitching against the hard plates. “Hephaestus can fix anything. He’s got all these freaky powers that can weld together the material, the metaphysical, the fuckin’ abstract… all the way down the line. He can also tear things apart. Rearrange the elements of things. He asked me to choose between the sword and something more conceptual.”

     The ocean rumbles under the floor. Jade waits for you to continue.

     “He told me he could rip the sprite coding right out of me. I’d be just some normal dude and a rotting crow corpse. It would make me fully human again, but I could tell he was holding back on telling me what the ‘temporal consequences’ would be. I knew if I got placed under his magic hammer, I’d be re-dooming the timeline by introducing an unplanned element. SBURB wouldn’t know what to do with me.”

     Jade stares at her toes and says nothing.

     “Kind of obvious what the right Choice was, then.”

     She looks over at you with her head bent low. “Didn’t do us much good in the end, though, did it?”

     “No. I guess it didn’t matter either way.” The breeze ruffles the feathers in your hair. “On the bright side, I think being part bird makes for a lot of charm. It adds personality.”

     A smile twitches at her lips. “I’d have to agree, coming from someone with dog ears.”

     “Our club needs a good acronym and bake sales every Thursday. Go part-animal or go home.”

     Jade fidgets with the cork of a half-empty vodka bottle on the counter. “Do you regret your Choice now that everything is…?”

     You sigh through your nose, disappointed that you failed to change the subject.

     “I mean, if this had still all happened, I’m sure I would’ve convinced myself that it was some sick consequence of going against my programming. Even more of a tortured soul than usual. So in hindsight, no, I guess I don’t. And flying is fun, so… win-win.”

     She stretches her arms, brown skin glinting in the light. “My Choice was so banal by comparison. Sign a contract or fight her to the death. Not much deliberation there, either.”

     "What’re you talkin’ about, sounds like a fair fight to me.”

     “Pssh, yeah. Cetus really _is_ a slug compared to Echidna. I couldn’t believe it when I first saw her. She’s the kind of huge that makes you feel dizzy. Her face would take up the whole house.”

     “Rose must’ve nicked those quills from the most obscure folds of her baby scales.”

     “Speaking of suing, I should reclaim those quills from her. If I ever get the chance.”

     “Yeah.”

     The melting ice in Jade’s glass makes a quiet chime as it sinks to the bottom. Jade clears her throat.

     “I’m glad we got most of the house cleaned up, though. I’ll probably keep coming back just to keep an eye on things. You don’t need to come along or anything, if it freaks you out to be here.”

     “Nah… it was weird at first, but I think I like it here. It’s very. Bright.”

     “Yeah, it is. I missed hearing a proper shore, even if the sea life is extinct. Mostly, I just want Rose to have something nice to come back to. It’ll be a good sendoff, I think.”

     Your feathers twinge. “Sendoff?”

     Jade looks at you with saucer eyes, mouth slightly open. She fumbles with her hands when you keep staring for clarification, her fingers twitching at her lower lip.

     “Well, I meant, if we make it through the window.”

     “Yeah, but wouldn’t you want to meet up with them all in person? Like, just for the hell of it before it all goes to shit?”

     “Would you?”

     “I mean….”

     “And tell them what?”

     Oh.

     She gnaws at her lip, looking frazzled. “You know they’re going to blame us. They’re off on that meteor right now, and they have his letter, and they’re so excited to meet us… how are we supposed to let them down like that?”

     You look away, and your cheeks burn. There’s the sound of her running her hands through her hair, a nervous titter of laughter escaping her.

     “I mean, if this timeline is going to dissolve, if it’s a dead end after all, then what does it matter if we stick around? We can just leave!”

     “Are you messing with me?”

     She blinks at you, and it sends a full-body shiver through you to see how serious she looks.

     “Of course I’m not.”

     You stare at each other.

     “Do you think it’s a bad idea? Do I sound crazy?”

     “Shit, Jade….”

     Deep in whatever you could call a mind, part neural conditioning and part digital programming, you know that running from anything is Plan Z at best. Don’t flee the training, don’t try to outrun the game, don’t unwind the clock until the last moment possible. Let yourself be the one to get things done, be the mover and shaker and the one who is physically unable to back down. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, _don’t_ turn back. This isn’t some faux-motivational “Never give up” spiel – this is an utter inability to dodge the bullet, and an insatiable need to devour it whole.

     But, of course, as you know and have always known, there is nothing left for a double-doomed player to do. You are being painstakingly strung along, and disappearing in the Furthest Ring is the only way to ensure that your ghosts won’t fade from paradox space.

     It might be time to throw in the towel.

     Your throat feels dry, so you swallow before you reply.

     "It’s not necessarily… a bad idea. I’m just wondering how long you’ve had this plan up your sleeve.”

     Jade digs her nails into her arm and glances at the floor. “I don’t know. A while.”

     “Were you going to tell me?”

     “Sooner or later.”

     The weight in your stomach hardens. “Oh.”

     “Would you do it too, if I decided to leave?”

     “I’ll think about it.”

     Her shoulders relax, and Jade adjusts her glasses. “Thank you. I’d hate to be alone.”

     “I’d hate that, too.”

     Slowly, you push yourself up and fold your sun-soaked wings, drifting over to where she sits and pushing bottles away to make room for yourself. Jade immediately rests her head on your chest, and you drape your spiraling tail once around the two of you.

     Jade thumbs the rough skin of your forearms, and her hair tickles the underside of your jaw.

     “I wonder what we did wrong for this to happen,” she says lowly. You let go of a slow exhale and shrug.

     “I wish I knew how to explain it in a way that’s not clinically Time-oriented. In simple terms, everything you do is planned from the start, and if you deviate you’re punished. No free will, right?” You reach an arm behind her and rest it in her hair.

     “But I guess it’s the lesser of two evils. Do what Skaia has mapped out for you and survive, or follow your own path and fuck it up for everyone else. But what counts as following your own path? Will you doom everybody because you stop to go to the bathroom instead of keeping your eyes glued on your client? How much are we able to prevent ourselves from falling flat on our faces?”

     Jade’s arms slide around your waist, and you feel her chest rise in a way that suggests she might cry. You wrap your good wing around her legs, and she burrows her fingers in your shirt hem.

     “Not much at all,” she says.

 

     The waves break on the island’s cliff. Jade settles her face closer, and as the water rumbles outside you let your vision unfocus. Over the top of her head are dark, gleaming rows of innumerable liquor bottles, all survivors of the game's fire. You close your eyes.

 


	27. Chapter 27

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 27 October, 2009

 

     A Dersite plane groans in mid-air, one of its wings hanging by cables. You hold your arm behind your head, building momentum, and when it starts to spark with crackles of lightning, you fling the vessel across the horizon. There’s a plume of smoke from the battlefield trees when the wreckage lands.

     “Touchdown,” Davesprite mutters.

 

     The perch you sit on is probably close to collapsing. A wobbling Prospitian tower reaches tentatively into the sky, and far below you the sound of crumbling brick can be heard. You nestle yourself between the ridges of the turret. Davesprite’s tail skims the surface and draws forth a cloud of plaster dust.

     One of the trees in the checkered horizon cracks and topples over from the impact. When the smoke fizzles out, you scan the battlefield and pick out a little Prospitian tank, stout and mustard-yellow with wear. It starts to hover out of the dirt.

     The tank follows the slow trajectory of your arm, like you’re winding back a baseball to pitch, and it too soars into obscurity. It takes seconds for the distant crash to reach you.

     “Another one bites the dust.”

     You flex your toes. “Next.”

 

     The dust and smoke that the tank sets off is only a thin thread, and it vanishes soon enough into the gray sky. You feel a disappointed detachment. You want something to crash and burn, to see something be rent apart. You wonder whether this is the impulse of an animalistic First Guardian, or if something inside of you has begun to curdle. Knowing the answer to this would not, however, satisfy the itch to watch something roast with neon fire.

     Half of a Dersite hull sticks out of the ground, violet and skeletal. The fuss it’ll kick up will probably be pitiful, but you’re running out of targets. You lift your palm up from your lap and summon it from the earth.

     Davesprite flexes his wings in a way that makes him look like he’s preparing for takeoff, and it’s a compulsion that tells you he’s anxious. Like the way your grandfather flicked his thumb and middle finger together in the middle of contemplating his journal, or how John would quietly crack his knuckles when something got on his nerves. You tear your eyes from the smoke when his twitching primaries brush your back.

     “What are you thinking about?”

     The muscles in his face spasm, the feathers of his neck puffing up slightly, and you can tell you’ve interrupted the middle of an internal monologue. He shrugs his shoulders.

     “Is it weird that metal sounds kinda freak me out?”

     “Metal sounds….”

     “Like, from really far away you can hear the steel breaking apart, and it’s setting me on all kindsa edges. At the family cookout and Aunt Geraldine is takin’ up the whole La-Z Boy. Got half my ass at the mercy of the winds.”

     “I like how it sounds.” You pop the bones in your fingers. “I’ll stop, though. I didn’t know. Sorry.”

     You let go of the hull as gently as you can, and it groans like a beached whale as it returns to the battlefield. Its chartreuse outline simmers out. It sort of agitates you that it isn’t hurdling across the sky at this very moment, but you’d rather be agitated than watch Davesprite tremble with nerves in your periphery.

     The nervous wing-flexing stops, but now he only watches you crack every bone in your hands, trying to occupy them in a way that doesn’t involve property damage.

     “You good?”

     The corner of your mouth fidgets downward. “I’m fine.”

     By now, the phrase “I’m fine” or anything resembling it has come to mean “I am not on the verge of tears nor a panic attack, but who knows for sure, life is full of surprises.”

     “It’s just that you’ve got the thousan’ yard stare goin’ on. I thought you were maybe remembering ‘Nam or something.”

     “Hm.”

     A muscle in his jaw clenches, and you guess he’s contemplating whether or not he should say whatever it is that’s come into his head.

     “Okay, so, don’t be offended –”

     Guess so.

     “— But, like, is there a reason you’re turning this into Demolition Derby hour? Are you mad, or…?”

     “No.”

     “Did I do something?

     You exhale through your nose. “You didn’t do anything, I promise.”

     His puffed feathers deflate, unconvinced but unwilling to push the subject. “Okay.”

     “I’m wound up. That’s all.”

 

     The engine inside of the Dersite plane finally combusts in a delayed reaction, and when you close your eyes you can see the flames lapping it up beyond the trees. A satisfied ripple runs through your arms.

 

     “I, uh. I dunno. You don’t seem like the kinda person who goes around wrecking shit for fun. Like, I’ve run into those types at school, and they probably woulda ended up microwaving forest critters before the end of high school.”

     Your mouth twitches. Don’t be offended.

     “Anyway. Thought the whole ‘let’s take a baseball bat to Old Man Jenkins’ mailbox’ gig wasn’t your style.”

     He coughs a little and rubs his arms, an awkward punctuation to his train of thought.

     “No, you’re right. It isn’t.” You will your hands to stop moving, laying your palms flat on your legs. The nerves bubble with protest. “You have to understand. Before we entered the game, every day was part of a larger blueprint to prepare us all for the transition. Looking back on it, I wasn’t accomplishing very much, but at the time I felt I was doing important work. I guess it made me feel like I was playing an important role, even if I was out in the middle of nowhere.”

     The treetops crack in the distance as some towering tree begins to splinter apart. The sound of it is hazy with distance.

     “But now, we’re… I’m not _doing_ anything. It’s infuriating to not be able to make any sort of difference. We’re just pouring teacups on this massive fire and pretending we’re not about to die.”

     Davesprite hangs his head and stares at his arms. “Yeah, I know. Trust me. I know.”

     “I just feel like I’m always about to drown. I have to keep kicking to keep my face above water.” A cold breeze passes through, and your bangs tremble in front of your eyes. “I guess kicking sometimes involves destroying government property.”

     For a while, he doesn’t say anything. Then, gradually, Davesprite leans across the turret and rests his elbow on the brick beside you. He doesn’t look at you, but you close the distance and rest your arm against his. His skin is icy from the high altitude.

     “I guess that makes me your swim floaties. By the time I’m through with you, you’ll look like a little kid whose mom wouldn’t let her leave the house until she had more inflatable plastic on than clothing. Safest little punk to ever pit-pat around the public pool.”

     The chill makes you shudder. You curl your legs up in the narrow ridge of brick and rest your head in your hand. Davesprite adjusts his position to support your weight.

     “I didn’t realize how it looks to someone without these powers. I’ve gotten so used to how it feels, it’s like they were always there.”

     It’s not far from the truth. Receiving Becquerel’s abilities felt like the culmination of a long series of inevitabilities, and once you grasped the Sun it burned in your hands as if to say, _Ah, finally – there you are_. At times you almost feel unwieldly, like a kid with a remote control helicopter simply trying not to lose control, but more or less you’ve nestled nicely within your niche of Space. You’ve forgotten what it was like not to have the universe at your beck and call.

     “I guess what I haven’t quite adjusted to is the absolute… capability for mass destruction. It’s frightening to know what I’m able to do.” You point at a Dersite palace at ten o’clock, black towers stark against the sky. “I could dismantle that entire building in a second. All I’d have to do is take the atoms apart and scatter them – it doesn’t matter where. Not even the foundation would be left.”

     You feel Davesprite flex his fingers uncomfortably, talons clicking together softly.

     “Probably the only thing I’m doing to help anyone is pilot this ship. If I faltered for a moment, or if something happened to me, they’d all die. It’s like a bodily reflex – I hardly have to think about piloting at all. But there’s always this nagging fear that in my sleep or something, I’ll drop the whole thing and kill us all.” You blink when your eyelids become suddenly heavy. “I wonder if I’m helping them at all, though. I’m just stringing everyone along to a dead end.”

     Davesprite nudges your upper arm with his, and you turn to look at him. His face is hard to read.

     “If it helps, I think you’re doing all those little guys a favor. I mean, look at how fucked up their lives were before you spirited this whole fuckin’ session away. Guys were hiding under rocks n’ shit hoping that the big bad wolf wouldn’t find ‘em. You’re giving them the chance to, I don’t know… recover, I guess? They get to, like, rediscover what it’s like to not be foot soldiers.”

     You’re sure they’ll stop being thankful once you lead them into a void session. Jack Noir is a yapping puppy compared to who waits for them beyond the fenestrated window.

     “Personally, you’re helping me out, too,” Davesprite continues.

     “How?”

     “By showing me that doomed timelines don’t have to be a repulsive mess of lava-sweat and nonstop snark. It’s good to know that it’s possible to be. I don’t know. Content.”

     The love you feel in the next moment is quiet and warm, pouring into your ribs and dissolving into your capillaries.

     “And I don’t mean to be pushy or anything, but your friends are gonna need you when we show up.”

     You can hear the hesitance when he almost says ‘if’ instead.

     “I get it, okay? I know there’s a whole pile of fucking Nothing on the other side, but I think it’d be a major faux pa to meet up after three years and be like, ‘hey guys, death is inescapable and nothing matters, wanna see me destroy a castle?’ Cue two hours of nihilist party tricks until the timeline shits itself and dies.”

     Your jaw clenches, making your teeth hurt. “That’s why it doesn’t matter if we ever show up. Better for them to be confused than distraught, don’t you think? They’d still be looking for us, thinking that we’re just running late and the session is still salvageable. And then it’d finally happen, and they’ll never have to know what happened.”

     “There’s no persuading you, is there.”

     It doesn’t sound like a jab, but it stings anyway. You fold your hands and stumble over apologies in your head.

     “I’m sorry. I know it sounds dark.”

     Davesprite doesn’t respond. A dangerous stream of words continues to broil in the base of your throat.

     “I can feel my personality changing. It hurts, and I know it’s messed up, but I can’t control it. I didn’t used to be this way. I didn’t used to give up so easily. I hope you can believe that. You’ve only seen a few hours’ worth of the person I used to be like.”

     In the backwoods, you can see two trees fall over from the strain of holding their own weight. Their roots splay like octopi out of the checkerboard.

     "It must be hard to deal with. I’m sorry if I’m scaring you.”

     At this last bit, Davesprite seems to startle. He turns his torso to face you as best he can, and his orange eyes shift by minutia as he tries to map your expression. You can feel how heavy the muscles in your face are, your mouth a cumbersome, horizontal line. When you say nothing more, he resumes his position and stares across the battlefield. His eyebrows are so furrowed it looks painful.

     “Sometimes I do feel like you’re so much higher above me. I mean, objectively you are – you’re an immortal dog girl and I’m whatever this is. By the game’s logic, you’re the biggest and best version of yourself. And I’m. Like, shit, what _am_ I? I’m the dumbass paperclip in the corner of your screen telling you how to change your autocorrect settings.”

     “Maybe you’ll think this is stupid,” you murmur. “Do you remember when I had to stitch you up, and I said that anyone else would die from your injuries?”

     “It rings a bell. Hard to tell, I’ve been subject to a number of back alley surgical procedures.”

     “Well, at the time I was thinking that spritehood was sort of like god tiering. If the game is upgrading our bodies to this… semi-immortal vessel, I suppose? Then being prototyped is in the same vein. It’s like resurrection, and your body becomes impossibly resilient in the way that not even god tiers are.”

     Davesprite laughs under his breath and squeezes his nose between his thumb and index. It takes a while for him to respond, so long that you think you’ve said something terribly out of line.

     “Yeah. Skaia pumped you guys full of godhood steroids, and I got my brain downloaded onto a computer server. I don’t even got customer service. Ain’t no Geek Squad out here to call when I start gettin’ funny in the head. I can see why you think that’s the same thing.”

     “You know what I meant.”

     “I guess so.”

     You wonder why it is that you always mess up even when you mean well.

     “So sometimes I’m kinda mixed up on how fair this all is. You literally achieved the highest reward possible in this fuckin’ game, but then you get to be dumped with me for three years. Like, ‘have fun with your game-breaking powers, now enjoy the many charms of this chumpass right here.’ And I guess I do feel kind of intimidated sometimes. In kind of an insecure way, maybe?”

     “I don’t think you’re a chumpass.”

     “And I don’t think you’re hard to deal with.”

     Davesprite’s chest lowers with a slow exhale. “I don’t think you’ve become an entirely new person. You’re still the Jade I liked before, and I still like you now. So you don’t scare me. We’re stuck in the same crappy kayak sailing down the shit river.”

     You slap your hand to your mouth to smother your sudden laughter, and Davesprite cracks into a broad smile at your reaction. He reaches out to lower your hand, then leans across the turret ridge and kisses you. To your embarrassment, your heart rate hasn’t yet become accustomed to this contact, and you fret that he can feel how quickly your blood courses under his hand. His fingers slide off your arm as he pulls away, leaving his perch between the white bricks to resettle in front of you. Davesprite sweeps his wings out as if to curtain you both off, then he touches his lips to yours again. There’s an undertone of insistence about it, and you cannot tell whether or not it’s a request for you, however many months in the future, not to leave behind everyone who needs you.

     You are so, so glad not to be alone.

 

     When Davesprite’s hands come to rest on your thighs, you pull away. He starts to angle his face toward your neck, but you reach out with both hands to hold either side of his jaw.

     “I want to show you something cool,” you say.

     Then you close your eyes, dredge up the Sun from its sleepy rest in your cells, and turn the two of you into a portal.

 

     You have only ever done this once. Partially because it’s easier to manually teleport than ask someone to hop through the silhouette of your body, partially because it makes you feel eerily formless. It’s a momentary limbo, paired with a split-second fear that you may never return to your physical form again. Like you’ve been hole-punched from the fabric of space entirely. The weight of your body folds in on itself and melts into the background, and all you can feel and see and sense is the astounding and boundless _infiniteness_ of everything around you.

     And it is this infiniteness, so impossible to describe with words, so alienating in the singularity of the experience, that you want to share with Davesprite.

     His shock is palpable. A torrent of images flood through the two of you, crisp and three dimensional and delightfully out of reach. You catch a colony of hummingbirds nestled in a lavender row at the top of a tree canopy, the brittle and sterile coral reef off the coast of an LOLAR island, a cluster of bickering pink turtles that snap at each other amidst temple ruins, the pipes of a broken Prospitian fountain that still spew water onto the floor of its battlefield palace, a bright red blossom on a LOFAF tree branch that’s just begun to bloom, the inside of an escape pod in the underbelly where a cluster of carapacians tell each other stories inside the cockpit, the underground tunnels where a mother iguana sleeps with her hatchlings huddled around her for warmth. You will him to know what it is to be you, what it’s like for all of these countless corners in space to be safely tucked inside your domain, and you know that he does because you’ve become blurred together at the edges. Some of what he feels leaks into yourself, and you sense the warm wonder that’s coursing off of him in waves. You respond with your own tidal wave, a citrus-sour flood of vibrant affection, and you can almost detect his hands tightening their grip.

     And finally, after what seems like both the seconds it took for SBURB to generate your planets and the billions of years it took the Incipisphere to evolve them, you let go. The two of you swim to the surface, gasping as your consciousness sinks into a flesh-and-blood form. Davesprite’s fingers shake, and you lower your hands to rest them on top of his.

     “Do you see what it’s like?” you ask.

     He looks at you with wide eyes, more dazzled than you’ve ever seen him. You crack into a smile when he just stares with his mouth open. It seems to wrench him from his stupor. He gives a breathy laugh, and his feathers twinge.

     “Yeah,” he whispers. His chest rises rapidly, amazed and breathless. “That’s fucking sick.”

 


	28. Chapter 28

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 22 November, 2009

 

     The clock in the corner of Jade’s screen says it’s 6:17 PM. Your phone says it’s 6:19.  That means you’ve been awake for three hours, and in twelve hours you’ll pass out again. Eleven if you try hard enough.

     This is all very subjective. If you felt like pursuing the topic, you’d egg Jade into rattling off Einstein’s theories on the fabric of time. But you don’t really care – you were an anonymous celebrity in your seventh grade class for your vandalizing of the natural science textbooks. Geology experiments never looked so erotic.

     It doesn’t feel like any time at all. The porthole displays the same shades of green and yellow whether it’s midnight or ten in the morning. Thank god for digital clocks; it could be your twentieth birthday and you wouldn’t even suspect it.

     So, let’s see. You should be falling asleep around six in the morning today. Or, shit, tomorrow. Doesn’t matter too much. You’ll probably sleep for twelve hours anyway.

 

     Today you’ve come to understand why Jaspers has a habit of draping himself over any living thing with body heat. Every time you go to see Nanna, she looks like a Bond villain, that giant pink cat slouched over her lap and giving off waves of rumbling purrs. Maybe it’s just because feline habits die hard, but you suspect it’s also because sprites’ body temperatures are based on how “active” your systems are. A sleeping computer is cold to the touch, whereas running several programs renders it painfully hot. When you find yourself relaxed and sedentary, your thoughts slow down and your core begins to cool. And so, like Jaspers, you seek other sources of heat. The most convenient, with her ever-high temperature and skin like a light bulb, is Jade.

     The only time you’ve seen a bird more pleased with its situation is when you walked past a cluster of pigeons on your way to school and saw one poke its head out of a family size bag of Fritos. Jade sits with her legs crossed, occasionally shifting them under the sheets so your weight doesn’t cut off her circulation. You prop your head up on your hand so you can see the laptop screen. Her body heat keeps you from feeling chilly even with one of your wings draped over you, but you’re pretending you’re lying across her as a way to childishly inconvenience her. You think she sees past the rouse, though. She’s unperturbed by your imitation of Jaspers, stroking the rust-colored feathers of your marginal coverts.

 

     You can’t imagine going back to having your own room. Being roomies with someone feels like the ideal situation, even if your current roommate is someone you constantly find yourself making out with. It would’ve been nice not to live alone when you were in Houston – you’d have someone watching your back when you got up in the middle of the night, and then maybe there’d be less of a chance of you being ambushed by your brother.

     (It’s remembering these freakish encounters with your guardian that makes you resist correcting yourself and referring to him as your dad. His being your ‘sibling’ was probably the only thing keeping anyone from calling CPS. Boys will be boys.)

     And on the other side of the scales, it’s always been good to know that you’re still fit for human interaction. Sharing a room with Jade reassures you that the timeline which coughed you up on the doorstep didn’t mold you into the creature from the black lagoon, all antisocial and hiding in your swamp cave. For example, you’d feel like one hell of a basement dweller if you were sitting in your own room, alone, watching old episodes online of _Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives_ , but somehow watching it with someone else makes it less sad and more funny.

     Hey, you said you were gonna introduce her to Guy Fieri sooner or later.

     Watching movies and TV online is essentially your only way of staying connected to what life was like on Earth. You’re pretty apathetic about it – you could go your whole life without noticing poorly-executed product placement in a chase scene – but it keeps you remembering what it was like to be normal, and it’s precious as hell to watch Jade pause the video and ask questions. Your favorite commentary of hers was when she paused five minutes into a drama, turned to look at you with wide eyes, and said “This is an unsafe environment for animals. Can you look up if the pets die in this one?” When she reaches across your wing and her hand hovers above the trackpad, you’re prepared for her to ask you if Flavortown is a real city. Instead she keeps quiet, her other hand contemplating the tufts of feathers at your scapulars.

     “Hey,” she murmurs. “Did you know your wing has grown back all the way?”

     You tilt back your head to look at her. “Really?”

     “Yup.”

     “They symmetrical and everything?”

     “Looks like it to me.”

     You’d stopped thinking about it – the regrowth of your wing has been so unpredictable in its pace that you assumed it’d be a year before it returned to its original span. You start to get up from across Jade’s legs and wind behind her to take a look for yourself.

 

     Fully unfurled, your wingtips almost stretch to each side of the room. What is that in numbers? Nineteen, twenty feet? You’re not sure. It’s been ages since you’ve felt air between your feathers like this. A vent on the floor spits a cold draft through your right wing, and all of primaries shiver in reaction. They feel weightless on your back, and as they unfold you feel a great pressure leave your ribcage. The shadow your wings cast swallows Jade completely, and she looks up at you with a small smile on her face.

     You slowly sweep your wings behind you, your second set of arms, and feel them brush the metal headboard of the bed. Then you build the tension in their muscles, summon what’s crow in you from wherever it sits pecking at acorns in the back of your brain, and flap them forward.

     Jade squeals as the draft of your beating wings blows her hair back. There’s a few scattered thuds as some things get knocked over, and she laughs at you as your cheeks turn gold.

     “You could have warned me before you kicked off a windstorm,” she says. She brushes her hair back to the way it was as you scramble off the bed to pick everything up. A stack of old CD cases have slid onto the floor, and you try to pile them up in a neat tower. You also straighten one of Jade’s spare watering cans (empty, thankfully), and pick up the books from Rose’s room that Jade has placed on top of the black case she keeps her bass in. With how excitedly your hands shake, you drop a volume on dream interpretation and evoke another laugh from Jade.

     “I’m glad they healed,” she says. Her voice is softer now, and you hear the sheets shift as she returns to where she was sitting. “You look really cool.”

     You start to push your sunglasses up out of impulse, but again realize they aren’t there. You clear your throat so your voice won’t crack.

     “Thanks, I know,” you respond. It takes a few sweeps of your palm down your face to get the gold to cool down.

 

     Jade lifts her hand from the keyboard so you can return to your spot. This time, you lie so that your folded arms rest on her knee. For added measure, you stretch out your wings as far as they’ll go and plop the left one over her shoulder, the right over her folded legs. She makes a noise of protest and puts her hand on your wing. On the screen, Guy Fieri is stuck in an expression of low-res bliss over the enchilada he’s stuffed into his piehole. His frosted tips blend into his forehead like he’s a _Simpsons_ character.

     “What are you doing, making a toga? You’re gonna shed all over me.”

     You flex your wings in response, and Jade forces the left down with both hands. You give her a melodramatic squawk as she makes your wing fold onto your back again, and a few orange feathers come loose.

     “Like you don’t have several on you at all times. I’m making you my personal feather duster. Submit to the plumage.”

     “Appropriate that you’re a duster, since I’m gonna clean the floor with you if you don’t get your wings out of my face.”

     “You drive a hard bargain.”

     You tuck your wings close to your back, insulating the both of you. Jade sighs and rests her hand back into your feathers – a promise that she’s _not_ going to clean the floor with you – and you finish watching Mr. Fieri ride the train to Flavortown.

 


	29. Chapter 29

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 01 December, 2009

 

     You are still short enough that the White Queen will indulge you when you want to be picked up, although she tells you that you’ll soon be too big. In her words, “once a princess is able to hold a scepter with one hand, she is to walk on her own two feet.” The effect of her words is lost, however, when her cold fingers are in the middle of scooping you up against her chest.

     The Queen’s fingers drum on the edge of John’s desk, and focusing on the rhythmic clicking lulls you close to sleep. You rest your head against the slick armor of her collarbone and stare across the room at your dozing brother.

     She takes you up here every now and then. You didn’t know you were allowed here until she led you up the winding staircase herself – you assumed you’d get in trouble for intruding otherwise. Dangerous forces were against you and the boy in the other tower, she explained, and it was her task to ensure you were safe. This is the reason for the guards who circle the main entrance to your dream tower day and night. This is the reason you are not to leave the circle of the inner city. This is the reason your queen spends long hours watching the dreaming faces of Prospit’s heroes.

     John twitches in his sleep. He seems unsure whether to toss or turn, and his body is tense under the patterned sheets. He looks almost ready to wake up, and it makes you anxious to watch him. You tug on the white folds of the Queen’s dress, and she gazes down at you with her glassy, black eyes.

     “When is John going to wake up?” you ask.

     A whistling sigh escapes her hinged jaw. She lifts her hand from the table and draws her fingers through your short hair. “Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps never.”

     You don’t know what to do with your disappointment.

     “Perhaps in only a moment.”

     You twist to glare at her and feel your eyebrows twist with protest. “ _Stooop_.”

     The White Queen’s shoulders rise in her version of a laugh. One of Skaia’s clouds drifts by to let in a stream of bright blue light, and it makes the white shell of her skull gleam.

     “Don’t fret, Jade,” the Queen says lowly. She draws you closer and pats your hair in a way she knows will calm your nerves. “Whenever your brother wakes, it will mean it is time for you to embark on a great game together.”

     You immediately think of Pictionary, but you are sure this is not the kind of game that princes and princesses play.

     “What kind?”

     “A game of life and death.”

     This is definitely not Pictionary.

 

     Across the room, your restless brother tosses onto his side and lets his arm hang over the edge of the bed. His mouth contorts into something like revulsion, and you desperately wish to leap from her lap and run to his aid. This is not princess-like behavior, though. And as you already know, no amount of comfort will wake him up. You have to learn what she calls a “refined detachment.”

     Her hand is chilly on your cheek. You shut your eyes and let the Skaialight warm you.

     “Protect him when the time comes, won’t you? I believe he’ll need your guidance more than he’ll realize.”

 

           

     Davesprite is typing something on his laptop when you wake up. His wings shift as he considers a sentence and mashes the backspace key. You clear your throat.

     “What time is it?” you rasp.

     Pause.

     “Eleven,” he replies. “Just about.”

     You feel around for your glasses. Somehow they ended up on the floor. A grunt comes out of you as you slump over the edge of the bed to swipe them from the ground.

     “Why are you up so early?”

     “Dunno,” Davesprite says. “Thought I’d get a fresh start to the day.” He closes the laptop lid and turns around. You comb your fingers through your hair to pull it back into a ponytail.

     “Early bird gets the worm,” you joke. The last two words are drawn out by your sudden yawn.

     “If the worm is a fucked up sleeping pattern, then yeah, I guess it does.”

     “The earliest bird gets a balanced Circadian rhythm.”

 

     You stare at the sheets while your hands twist your hair into shape. The bright blue of your dream stays in colorful blobs behind your eyelids. A horrible ache blooms in your gut, and you can’t decide whether it feels like the choking seconds before you throw up, or the clench of panic when you first realize that you can’t breathe. You don’t see why it can’t be both.

     When the White Queen started taking you to John’s tower, you must’ve been six. Five? No, you’re sure it was six. When did she tell you about SBURB, then? She didn’t waste much time, you’re sure of that. That same week, you remember making yourself a bread loaf for your birthday. It fit in the palm of your hands, and was a little bit clumpy, but it wasn’t terrible. You used sparklers from a crate of your grandfather’s fireworks instead of candles. When they burned too brightly, Bec snapped at them so you wouldn’t get burned. It was the week you turned six, then.

     You start to lay down again and pull the pillow over your face to smother the yellow that seeps into your eyes. Just as you start to close your eyes, though, something dawns on you. Davesprite’s eyes widen when you straighten up and make a noise of realization.

     “It’s my birthday!” you cry.

     The boilers kick on downstairs, and above the ceiling you hear someone’s feet clunking to shut their door.

 

     “Oh, _shit_ ,” Davesprite says slowly. The look on his face tells you he doesn’t know whether or not to feel guilty, but it evaporates as soon as you crack into bewildered laughter.

     “I can’t believe I forgot my own birthday!” you shout. “When did it become December?”

     Davesprite covers his face with his hands. “Man, I don’t fucking know. Jesus, Jade, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t keeping track at all.”

     “God, I wasn’t even thinking about that. Don’t worry about it.” You throw yourself down against the mattress and slap your hands over your eyes. “I can’t _believe_ ….”

     “If it makes you feel any better, I’m completely detached from my birthday. So we’re kind of on the same footing here.”

     Your hands fly from your face as you slap the bedsheets. Davesprite flinches at your reaction, and you stare at each other for a moment when you lurch upright again.

     “Wait! You know what this means?”

     “We need to alchemize candles?”

     “No! It means the exact opposite!” You kick the sheets off of you and move to the end of the bed, lowering your voice to a whisper. “It means we _cannot tell Nanna_ about this. Do you know how badly she’d freak out? She’d think we didn’t tell her on purpose, and she’d be _so_ upset, and –”

     “What would I be upset about?” comes a voice from behind you.

     Both you and Davesprite scream, your hands to your chests, as Nanna materializes in the doorway. She’s phased her ghost hand through the door to unlatch the chain keeping it locked, and now vivid gold pours into the room.

     “Nanna!” you say a bit too loudly. “Can we do something for you?”

     A furtive grin splits her face, and the beaded chains hanging from her earpieces tremble. “Oh, Jade. You never cease to endear yourself to me with how secretive you _think_ you are.”

     You feel one of your Bec ears flick involuntarily. “What do you mean?”

     Davesprite’s voice is almost inaudible in your ear. “It means the jig is up.”

     “Bingo! That’s the correct answer,” she cries. Davesprite shrinks, surprised that her ears could pick him up. “Really, it’s precious that you kids think you can keep something as vital as a birthday out of my knowledge. Who do you think I am?”

     You’re afraid to answer.

     “Well, do I have to formally request for you to get up? Because if so, I regret to inform you I’ve run fresh out of cardstock,” Nanna hoots. You stretch one leg out, unsure what to do, and she snaps her fingers so loudly that it makes you jump again.

     “Have your ears filled with sand? Get up, I can’t hold the chess folk at bay forever!”

     “Chess… why would you…?”

     “You think they won’t drive straight into the cake if I leave them unattended?” Nanna huffs. She coasts over and yanks you out by the arm, and you struggle not to fall on your knees. “Hurry, both of you!”

     She shoots a glare behind you at Davesprite to get him out of bed as well. A full-body shiver runs through him at the ferocity of her look, and before you know it you’re both being dragged to the kitchen by the brute force of Nanna’s passion for celebratory desserts.

 

     “You’ll find that I neglected to include candles, dear,” Nanna laments. “I hope you can forgive me. You see, the thing is –” she leans across the kitchen island and whispers to you in a hiss. “— the chess folk are quite poor with fire safety. The smoke detector went off last month while I was making stir fry, and they hadn’t the first idea of what to do. I thought we’d play it safe today.”

     “It’s all right, Nanna. Really. I wasn’t expecting anything, you don’t have to –”

     She clucks to interrupt you, shaking her head sagely. “’Didn’t expect anything,’ she says. Can you believe her?” She looks at Davesprite for validation, and he only shrugs.

     “It’s the truth, though! I never really did anything for my birthday. It felt kind of weird trying to celebrate by myself.” You test the edges of your fork on your fingertips. “Bec certainly didn’t understand the concept.”

     Nanna pushes her glasses up and gives you a look of utter devastation. She opens her mouth twice to respond.

     “We have a lot to make up for, then, don’t we?” she rasps at last.

 

     As always, the battleship’s cafeteria is loud and bright and full of pounding sound that makes your head hurt. Nanna has gone truly off her rocker – there can’t be any less than fifty cakes all scattered through the room. The carapacians have wasted no time digging in. A few tables away, a gaggle of Dersites laughs at one of their friends who’s gotten icing splattered on their shell. You strain to keep your ears from flattening against your hair.

     Nanna wields a knife twice the size of her hand, carving careful slices out of a sky blue cake.

     “Ah, and I’ve used the last of that lovely green again. What an oversight. You’ll have to keep me on track, Jade, or all my cakes will be blue forever!”

     “No, I don’t mind. Blue was my favorite for a long time.” You twirl your fork between your fingers, unsure what to do ever since Nanna insisted that she didn’t need any help. “I’m sure the color won’t make it taste any less wonderful.”

     Nanna eyes you with a small smile and wags the frosting-crusted knife at you. “Someone’s trying to weasel more than her fair share out of me. Luckily for you, you deserve it.”

     Her eyes widen, and with a tiny gasp Nanna turns and pulls another cake from where it rests on the stove. She places it delicately next to yours and beams at Davesprite.

     “Apologies, Dave, but I couldn’t help myself. Here’s your cake as well – two days early.”

     Davesprite’s mouth hangs open. He clacks the edges of his empty plate nervously, but the sound of his talons is lost in the buzz of carapacian conversation. “I… well, thank you.”

     “You act like you’ve never come face-to-face with a birthday cake before,” Nanna sniffs. “Don’t eat it all at once, all right?”

     He clamps his mouth shut again.

     “Now!” Nanna sighs, satisfied. She pushes the platters towards you both. “Help yourselves.”

 

     Anyone who claims that dessert is not a proper meal has never eaten a slice of what is on your plate. It’s been so long since you’ve come down here for a nocturnal baking session that you feel like weeping.

     Nanna spends half of her time with you giving you quiet looks, as if to see whether your stomachs have shrunken since the last time you were down here. She seems content, though, when you can barely get a sentence out between bites. Davesprite keeps his shoulders hunched, trying to mask how quickly he’s eating.

     “Do you have any plans for today?” she asks eventually. Her face rests on her fist.

     “Mm… I don’t think so.” You wipe the crumbs on your fork onto the edge of the plate. “I haven’t really been in a partying mood for a while now, so you don’t have to do anything.”

     “Are you sure?”

     “Yes, Nanna, I’m sure. This is fine by me. Thank you.”

     She sighs softly and nods in resignation. “As long as you’re happy. It’s only that I feel I should be much busier right now! Any holiday that warranted baked goods in _my_ home was two steps away from a state-wide affair.” Nanna materializes a dainty tea spoon to stir the cup she’s brewed, sugar cubes still melting in the hot tea. “My son once sent an invitation to the Queen of England when I was preparing for his eighteenth. She never responded, unfortunately. Shame. We had plenty of cookies.”

     You purse your lips and drag your fork through the crumbs. It’s hard to pin down the feeling that sticks like tar to the inside of your chest. Something like nostalgia, something like hard, bitter resentment that you had to spend your last decade of birthdays looking out over an empty ocean. You inhale sharply through your nose to tame the water that stings in your eyes.

     Behind Nanna, a clock on the stove blips to 12:27. Your heart seizes and sighs, and you realize what’s making you miserable. Eight months have slipped by, and you have no clear way of knowing how much you’ve changed. Eight months have slipped by, and you are nowhere closer to understanding what a normal life could have been like.

     Well, as long as you’re happy.

     Under the table, something nudges your foot. You peer to look, and what stares back at you are the two wet, amphibious eyes of Casey.

     “Oh!”

     Davesprite looks over to follow your line of sight. “Hey, check it out. It’s the Salamancer.”

     “What? No, this is Casey.” At the sound of her name, Casey latches her toes into your leggings and uses them to crawl into your lap. Her hooded face pokes over the table ledge and blows a tiny bubble of approval.

     “Ah, there he is,” Nanna says. “ _I_ was calling him Lemon Tart. I was wondering where he’d gone – he comes in here all the time, pattering all over the place. Quite a good taste tester, too. He and Jaspers get on famously.”

     “Casey is a girl,” you blurt.

     “Oh, my,” Nanna hoots. She takes a sip from her teacup. “Awfully sorry for the mistake, little one.”

     “Look who’s gendering the consorts, now,” jokes Davesprite.

     Casey releases an indifferent bubble of spit and rests her webbed feet on the counter. You scrape up a bit of icing onto your fork to let her have some, but she takes the whole fork out of your hands for herself.

     “ _I’m_ not,” you respond. “J— well, I didn’t come up with it.” You occupy your hands by retying the loose scarf around Casey’s neck. “I wonder where she’s been this whole time.”

     “She’s an elusive one,” Nanna says. “I swear I’ve caught her rummaging around in the vent system more than once. I’ve no idea how she manages to hide so well.”

     Content with her fill of artificial sugars, Casey spits your fork back onto the island and curls up into a black lump on your lap.

     “I’m surprised she hasn’t wiggled out of her robes yet,” you murmur. You rest one of your arms around her, and she rumbles in her throat. “She must be very toasty.”

     Nanna sets her cup down and claps her hand on the counter. “Ah! You just reminded me!” She points one finger at Davesprite, and he swallows a bite of cake slowly.

     “Dave! Why haven’t you replaced that raggedy old thing yet?”

     He looks side to side. “You mean, like, my coat of feathers? ‘Cause I don’t think it’s anywhere near molting season….”

     “No, _that_!” Nanna gestures at the loose tank top Davesprite wears. It’s a little unfair to call it raggedy, but it’s seen better days. A few holes mar the hems. “Honestly, it’s December now. You’ll catch cold.”

     “I mean… seasons don’t exist here. I’m not sure I can get sick, either.” He sticks his talon in his mouth, trying to get the icing out from under it.

     “Nonsense! Anyone can get sick.”                                                  

     She swoops around to your side of the counter. A long roll of blue measuring tape fizzles into being from her hand, and Nanna clucks at Davesprite as she takes note of the width of his wings. He freezes, his arms to his sides. You snicker at the look on his face.

     “I can have it done in two days, believe you me. All I’ll need to do is alchemize the fabric. What’s your favorite color, dear?”

     Davesprite blinks. “Uh, I guess I like red.”

     “Red! That’s all I need to know.” She pats the feathers on top of his head, and he squeezes his eyes shut like he’s expecting a wallop. “Set a timer – in forty-eight hours you’ll have something suitable to wear for the season.”

 

     Due to the chess folk invading the dishwasher with their metric ton of plates and silverware, you and Davesprite are stuck washing your own dishes. When you turn on the garbage disposal to dump some stubborn globs of hard frosting down the drain, his feathers puff up higher than you’ve ever seen them. It looks like he’s wearing a boa.

     “Jesus _Christ_ , I forgot how demonic those things sound,” he gasps. “Though I gotta say, it’s less terrifying if you use it for its intended purpose.”

     “What exactly were you putting into your garbage disposal?”

     His feathers start to settle. “Puppet parts. Soda can tabs. Lit sparklers. Y’know, normal stuff.”

     “Lit sparklers?”

     “Yeah. We threw a blanket over it before the alarm went off. Was pretty sick. I got a long-exposure shot of it. Looked like a baby dragon was throwing up and having an asthma attack at the same time.”

     “Nice.”

     Davesprite scrubs at a patch of crumbs on his plate. With the length of his claws, it’s hard for him to properly hold a sponge. It slips twice out of his fingers, and he grumbles under his breath.

     “Speaking of sparklers in the garbage disposal….”

     You raise your hand in defiance before he can finish. “No, we are not putting anything in this sink.”

     “What? No, I was gonna ask if you wanted to go out tomorrow.”

     Your ears twitch. “What’s that have to do with sticking fireworks where they don’t belong?”

     “We did it for the Fourth of July.” He shrugs. “Reminded me of holidays ‘n shit.”

     You run warm water over your silverware and watch the clumps of blue and white slide down the drain. “Okay, well, what do you want to do?”

     “Thought maybe we’d crash somewhere and eat the rest of the cake. Tomorrow’s like, birthday limbo. The weird in-between date.” Davesprite gives up scrubbing and uses his long claws to scrape the food from his dish. “It sounds campy as hell now that I’m sayin’ it out loud, though.”

     “It’s not campy, that’s just you.”

     “Thanks.”

     “But I like the idea! We should do it.” You dry your hands off on a dark orange dish towel, then sling it over the arch of the faucet. “You can tell me all about your misuse of dangerous flammables.”

     “That’s a subject that never gets old.”

     “Is there a slideshow you should be compiling about the art of birthdays?”

     Davesprite laughs a bit. “Unless you’re interested in a slideshow about how to evade the infamous Birthday Opossum and his two-handed flail, you’re shit out of luck.”

     “What’s the Birthday Opossum?”

     “That’s a secret my bro took to his grave.”

 

     There’s a clatter of plastic that makes you both whip around. On the counter behind you, Casey Lemon Tart von Salamancer eats directly out of a container of sprinkles. You stare at the black-robed little thing, feeling slightly strange, and suddenly the room feels empty.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the only purpose this chapter served was to assure you that casey didnt explode


	30. Chapter 30

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 02 December, 2009

 

     Yesterday’s cake has gone a little stale – a bit too crunchy on the outside – but for you, all cakes are created equal. You are, however, starting to understand why John turned his nose up at them. Sooner or later you’re gonna have to google the warning signs of a diabetic coma.

 

     Across the observatory, Jade has graduated to drinking directly out of the bottle. LOLAR’s kaleidoscope ocean refracts off the green glass of a merlot bottle in her hand. The smell of it leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

     “I’m sure Old Lady Lalonde is tickled pink that her collection hasn’t gone to waste. Must be beamin’ down from Heaven over the wee teenagers clearing it out for her.” A pop of sunlight colored yellow from the rainclouds dyes your wings gold.

     Jade toys with the cork. “I really don’t think you need to be worried about it.”

     You break eye contact, wings flexing to absorb the light coming in from the panels of windows.

     “I’m being ‘responsible’ about it,” she continues, fingers curled to make air quotes.

     “Okay.”

     At least she hasn’t asked you if you want any.

 

     The Land of Light and Rain’s dazzling sand bleaches the observatory whiter. The telescope Jade perches beside is alive with the color that washes across it. You wonder what you’d see if you looked through the scope right now.

     “During our timeline,” you start. Jade looks at you with that almost piteous gaze she gives you when you start these trains of thoughts. You almost change the subject, but it’s already out in the air.

     A towering wave hits the island outside, and you hear it lapping on the craggy rocks.

     “During our timeline, Rose altered the telescope so she could keep watch for the underlings. After a while, I think she started camping up here so she could see everything around her. It made her feel less likely to be attacked, I guess.” You fiddle with a bit of cake and pop it in your mouth. “As if Jaspers wouldn’t have clawed the faces off of anything that came within a mile of her.”

     Jade lifts one hand absentmindedly and toys with the magnifying dials along the telescope. The sound of the metal whining reverberates into the domed ceiling.

     “She told me not to use SBURB to keep an eye on her. I’m pretty sure it was a one-way street – I’d get these messages at five in the morning asking me when I was gonna clean the sink out.” Your tail snakes and flicks along the floor, agitated blips of digital orange. “I did it anyway, though. Only a few times. There were so many bottles up here. Blankets everywhere. And there she was – criss-cross applesauce, lookin’ out of that damn thing. Must’ve been testing whether she could zoom far enough to see the horrorterrors.”

     “Did she ever tell you why she did it?” she asks softly. She’s drawn her knees up to her face, looking significantly smaller.

     “Did what?”

     “Why did she start drinking?”

     Your long sigh whistles through your teeth. “Who can say for sure. Maybe since her mom had fucked off, she thought she could guide herself through the game if she picked up on her habits. Like channeling her spirit spinster or something. Or maybe she was just bored out of her fucking mind. I don’t know.”

     Jade flexes her toes, looking down. “Oh.”

     “I’m not trying to be some ‘above the influence’ spokesman or anything. That’s just the impression I got.”

     The chill in your arms extends to your wings and makes the feathers shiver. A raincloud passes over the dome of the observatory, and you hear a soft pattering as the drops run down the windows.

     Slowly, you push yourself up and weave yourself behind and in front of Jade so that your folded wings rest on her legs. Your tail twitches where it trails down the stairwell.

     “I miss her.”

     Jade exhales quietly, and you feel her stretch her legs out to be underneath your wing.

     “I know,” she says. “Me too.”

 

     Right now, your sister is hurdling near light speed through a great tangle of unfathomable monsters, slipping between the same beaks and eyes and appendages whose echoing calls made you nauseous in your waking hours on Derse. Right now, she’s wandering dark stairwells and alleys of giant cathodes and glass chambers of creatures curdling in their own chemicals. A ceiling of wires and vent chutes and circuit breakers becomes lost in the deep cellars of a meteor laboratory, and in the heart of the rusting, tarnished labyrinth is a girl who could trust the Elder Gods, but could not trust her twin.

     God, you hope she isn’t drinking.

     “How did you feel when you found out?” comes Jade’s voice. You’re lifted back into the hazy present, and LOLAR’s light suddenly hurts. “When you found out you were siblings, I mean.”

     You stretch your right wing out all the way and then fold it again, creating a sharp draft. “I think my first thought was, ‘huh, that explains a lot.’ Like, we’re not identical, right? But sometimes I’d catch us doing the same ticks that you couldn’t really explain away by claiming we’d spent too much time together.”

     “Like what?” You can hear the smile in her voice.

     “We had the same focusing face. Every time we’d look at each other’s notes or open a phone screen we had this look on our face like we just watched someone vomit. It made our faces look a lot alike.”

     “I didn’t want to say anything, but yeah, you do make that face.”

     You laugh a little and pinch the bridge of your nose. “And even with the accent difference, it always sounded like we had the same flat way of talkin’. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if her questions were rhetorical or not.”

     Jade sighs quietly through her nose. “It’s always nice to pinpoint the similarities. It’s like you don’t exist in a bubble, because someone hundreds of miles away has the same traits as you even if you weren’t raised together.”

     “Yeah. I think that’s why I didn’t flip out or have a crisis or anything. Talk about ‘secret family trope’ nonsense. Nah, I thought it was cool as hell. Like my own extremely limited family tree had this new lifeboat I could jump onto once the main ship started sinkin’. I dunno.”

     “I understand.”     

     Warm light pokes directly into your eyes, and you turn your head to face the bottom of the telescope.

     “What do you think they’re getting up to right now?” Jade asks. It takes a few seconds for you to register the question.

     “Probably ceremoniously spitting into a communal bucket and eating larvae for breakfast,” you mutter. “Won’t be surprised if they come back speaking another language. All clicks and hisses ‘n shit.”

     “I don’t think we need to worry about them forgetting English.” Jade slides the merlot bottle across the observatory. It spins twice, making a windmill of green where it reflects on the floor. “I only wish Pesterchum worked out here.”

     “I don’t know if that would make things easier or harder.”

     “At least they’d know what they’re getting into.”

     You can hear Jade’s fingers fidgeting, running her fingertips over her nails.

     “We should just face it. There’s so many of them on that meteor, and they’re probably having the time of their lives. They’re going to come here so ready for us to all click together the same as before, and all we’ll do is drag them down.” There’s the soft sound of her running her fingers across her cheeks. “I don’t want to be the one to ruin them like that.”

     “Don’t know where you’re getting the ‘we’ from,” you mumble. “I’ve given up completely on them thinking of me at all. If they see me, they’ll just be like, ‘Oh hey, you didn’t get hit by a car or eaten by a cat yet? Who decided to save _you_ from the Reckoning’?”

     “No one’s going to think that.”

     “Dave will.” You clench and unclench your fist, feeling the talon tips poke into your palms. “I don’t know what’s worse – people being surprised you still exist, or them being disappointed.”

     The cake has been long forgotten. Jade rests her hands in your feathers, and they shudder involuntarily. Her hands are cold from handling the bottle. A dry burn crawls through your throat, and you feel your eyes sting.

     “I already know Rose’s stopped thinking about me,” you say once you’re sure you’re in control of your voice. “What’s the point in remembering the sad sack version of a brother you can already hang out with in person. I’d just be reminding her of a shitty timeline where both of us shat the bed about as hard as anyone can.”

     “But she has those memories though, right?”

     “I mean, yeah.”

     You watch Jade raise her face to the ceiling, searching for a response. She thumbs your feathers, and you close your eyes at the repetitious movement.

     “Then I don’t think she’d forget about you! Having those memories… well, if you’re the only two people who understand, then you can’t forget about each other. Even when it’s over, it’s part of both of you.” She punctuates her thought by shrugging her shoulders.

     You feel held down by weights, and you don’t know whether to question just how much Rose remembers of your timeline by now. Maybe it’s been whittled away over the months, supplanted by memories of a shiny, four-limbed, immortal version of yourself. Maybe your timeline has unraveled like a bad dream in the dark, the fine details leaking into the floorboards and disappearing. Maybe no one is waiting for you on the other side of that window after all.

     “Let’s say Rose has a lot of her memories intact by the time we meet up. That’s great, but she still won’t get it. She didn’t have to sacrifice so much. She doesn’t have a magical animal version of her scampering around dealing with the consequences of saving her and her friends.” You gnaw on your thumb’s talon. “She still has a purpose, I guess is what I’m getting at.”

     “You don’t think you have a purpose?” She sounds so hurt.

     Your eye twitches. “That came out wrong. You’re gonna have to cut me some slack here – the programming does weird things to your self-perception.”

     Jade stays quiet.

     “I mean, some sprites have this wonky coding where they kinda… take things into their own hands if they think they can’t fulfill what they were prototyped to achieve, or if they think they’ve already accomplished it.” You pause. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You should already know.”

     “Sort of? Maybe you should explain.”

     “Somewhere deep in our hardware, there’s something you can really only call a self-destruct button. A lot of us do it on accident, mostly when the two components are totally fucked up and unstable. But you can do it on purpose, if you want.”

     The tension in Jade’s muscles is palpable, and her hands have stopped moving through your wings. The only reason you keep talking is out of the hope that she won’t turn to stone completely.

     “Around the time the meteors started heatin’ up, I was thinking a lot about what I was gonna do once I delivered the sword. Or like, uh, how I was gonna cope with _not_ having anything to do. We all knew the session was fucked. I didn’t wanna sit around and twiddle my thumbs, waitin’ to get busy unexisting.”

     “You were going to….”

     “I was gonna split the ole atom. Abort the operation. Delete System 32.” A lump forms in your throat, and you swallow hard to get rid of it. “It seemed like the best option. But, y’know. Stuff gets in the way.” You mean for it to sound like a joke, but no one is laughing. Jade’s hands aren’t still anymore – instead, they tremble as she curls her fingers inward.

     “I’m glad you didn’t do it,” she finally whispers.

     “Yeah, it’d suck ass to go this journey alone, wouldn’t it.”

     Jade shakes her head. “No, that’s not it. I mean, I _am_ glad I’m not alone. But I also care about you a lot.” Her hand travels to your arm, and you feel goosebumps rise at the brush of her fingers. “I’m happy we got to know each other.”

     Your heart is going to leap out of your damn chest. Time to activate the classic Plan B: turn it into a fucking joke before someone cries.

     “I didn’t mean it about not having a purpose, by the way. I’m living it now, really. I mean, the whole reason I came back here to kick it with y’all was because we accidentally dropped you guys in the pool and didn’t dunk you in rice soon enough.”

     Jade seems too upset to understand the joke.

     “What?”

     “I mean, the job title on my nametag is ‘Prospit Dreamer Asst. Manager.’” You shrug as best you can in your current position. “I’m still doing that now. I’m glad I can still protect one of you.”

     The fingers that brush your arm tighten so quickly that her nails scrape you, and Jade’s body goes tense again. Well, fuck, Plan B crashed and burned.

     “How can you say that?” she demands. Her voice is low and strained, and you’re afraid to look at her directly for fear that she might start to cry. “You can’t say that you’re glad to be alive just so you can be a bodyguard. Have you forgotten who I am? I can guard my own body, thanks.” Her hands spark with an involuntary crackle of chartreuse, and it shocks your skin. “Can’t you just be alive to see all _this_?”

     Jade sweeps her arm out to motion at the splashes of pink and blue that shine pastel through the windows. You start to sit up just so that you’re not being scolded while literally lying on the floor, shrouding yourself with your wings as if it’ll help.

     “Don’t you want to be alive for your own sake?” she asks.

     You stare at her face, how her brow is twisted into something between exasperation and defeat. A raincloud finishes its slow trail over the dome, and the light that it lets in casts a bright, citrusy yellow across the both of you.

     “Would it make you happy if I tried?”

     Jade closes her eyes, the contorted muscles in her face relaxing, and she hangs her head. For a while you think the conversation is over, but when she looks at you again her look is softer.

     “Yes, Dave. It really would.”

     You crack a shy smile. “Can I at least be an emotional bodyguard?”

     “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘psychiatrist.’” Jade’s voice is tired, worn out from a rare outpour of sudden emotion. “Let’s just keep the current arrangement, okay?”

     You hold out your hand to high-five her, then draw a smile out of her by holding onto her hand when she meets your palm with hers.

     “Yeah, I can deal with that.”

 

     The house settles, something deep inside the walls groaning as the breeze disturbs the foundation. You’re too high up to hear the waterfall gurgling under the living room, but a gentle vibration remains under the floor. It could also be the furnace kicking on – your plates have begun to tremble infinitesimally.

     “I wanted to cry, on that first day,” you murmur. You tighten your grip on Jade’s hand. “I was so happy to see you guys. I missed you so much.”

     Jade sighs through her nose and rests her other hand on top of yours. You know there’s nothing she can say in response, nothing that doesn’t sound like a claim to understand. You know she can’t understand, and you’re content for this feeling to be yours alone.

     “I’m proud of how far you got,” you say. “And I’m really, really glad I stuck around to see it happen.”

     Jade’s smile comes out of hiding, making her cloud of freckles scrunch up around her eyes.

     “I’m glad you stayed, too.”

 

     Okay, let’s be real. No matter what Jade tells you, there’s always going to be a program running in your code that makes you inclined to protect anyone wearing gold dream pajamas. Try to open the task manager to close out of it, and shit just keeps on sucking up CPU. You respect that Jade does not need protecting – if anything, _she_ should be protecting _you_. But you are never going to leave a Prospit dreamer to fend for themselves, never again. And if defending Jade means following her to the Furthest Ring, then so be it.

 

     You push yourself fully upright. Drawing your “knees” as far in as they’ll go, you rest your plated arms on your sprite tail.

     “Hey, Jade?”

     “Yes?”

     The end of your tail curls into a nervous spiral. “You know how you were talking about, like… flying the coop and everything? Ditchin’ the session before anyone’s the wiser?”

     Her fingers flinch. “Sure, of course.”

     “I think I made a decision.”

     You see the nerves filter through her. “Did you?”

     “Yeah. If we still exist when the ship lands, I agree. Fuck it. Let’s just leave, they’ll get on without us.”

     “Are you sure?”

     “Sure as I’ll ever be.”

     Jade lets go of the breath she’s been holding, and to your surprise she buries her face in her hands. You start to worry you’ve finally made her cry, but when she takes her hands away she’s smiling.

     “I was sure you must’ve thought I was crazy, back when I suggested it.”

     You force your smile back. “Well, I sort of already did.”

     “Hey!”

     “But in a good way.”

     “What is ‘good crazy?’”

     “Crazy cute.”

     Jade smacks your wing, and you squawk in response. “Ugh! You’re such a dweeb.”

 

     You use your wings to draw Jade against you, and she rests her hands on your collar as you kiss her. Some of the Green Sun’s static stays inside her skin, and it crackles between you. When you lift your hand to press it against her hair, it brushes the dials of the massive telescope. It stands watch even now, waiting to resume its vigilance of the world beyond the Incipisphere.


	31. Chapter 31

     You’d be less bored during the day if time zones weren’t an issue.

     You should be used to it, but the disparity still stresses you out. It’s like you’re all in a marathon, and your friends are waiting at the finish line for you to hurry up and complete the final lap. During the early morning and the long hours of the evening, you keep mental notes of everything you want to talk to them about when they finally log in five, seven, eight hours ahead of you. Maybe you’re watering your plants and rehearsing a message to John in your head, how you’ll tell him about the latest disappearance of your pumpkins. You might be in the study, placing bookmarks in your grandfather’s yellowing tomes and picking out quips to share with Rose. No good to save it all for Prospit – you know you’ll forget everything the moment your eyes open.

     The colored bands on your fingers multiply for each unoccupied minute. Half the day melts by just wishing the hours away.

             

     Today, the air outside is soft in its warmth. You’ve cranked open the bottom panels of the atrium’s windows, and a pleasant breeze tickles the leaves of your plants. You kneel by the window closest to the record player, the smell of salt water finally reaching your nose. When Pesterchum pings with the sound of someone logging on, it’s almost lost in the music playing over the speakers. Ears twitching at the electrical sound, Bec rolls over from his spot in the middle of the aisle. You pause to pat his flank on your jog to your laptop, his fur heavy with sunlight.

     Rose is online! After this morning’s spat with your grandfather when you went outside with only a musket, you’re not up to dealing with any more boys. You take your laptop from a table of onions and plop down beside a stack of terracotta pots.

 

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 9:47 --

GG: back from school?? :o  
TT: What an uncanny guess.  
TT: Yes, I just finished a fainting spell in the doorway after escaping the capsule of human body heat known as a school bus.  
TT: Am I to assume you’ve placed a GPS tracking device in my backpack? Beeping comically while I fail to notice its obvious, oddly futuristically-designed presence amidst pencil bags and English workbooks?  
GG: pff, youre so silly rose  
GG: obviously im going to assume that someone logging in after four on a wednesday is getting back from school duh!!  
TT: I apologize for being presumptuous. As you must be able to tell, I am a very important public figure, and many dangerous people are often trying to “get me,” as they say.  
GG: rest assured i have not planted any spy gear in your stuff rose i am just very very intuitive :)  
TT: As has been established many times.  
TT: How may I help you?  
GG: lol you always think im messaging you because i need something  
GG: has it occurred to you that i might be pestering you because i want to TALK to my FRIEND who i have not TALKED to since MONDAY, miss very important public figure lady???? >:|

 

     It’s hard not to admire Rose’s dedication. Hers is the shortest response time – John takes long pauses in between getting baked good thrown at him by his father, and although he’s always glued to the Internet, Dave takes minutes to respond to everything. You’ve assumed this is an attempt to seem busy. But Rose wastes no time firing off her retorts, and you’ve come to realize that anything less is below her standards. Late is not better than never.

     (It’s also because she takes the magnifying glass to your conversations more than anyone else, like she thinks you’ll slip up and reveal the wizard behind the curtain. But it would seem pompous to say she finds you more interesting than the boys, wouldn’t it?)

     Becquerel yawns to reveal a bright green tongue. He ambles sleepily over and lays down with a grunt, his head resting on your ankle. A whine stews in his throat – a passive-aggressive complaint that he hasn’t received breakfast yet.

  
TT: Oh, dear. No, that never made the faintest wisp across my mind. Very important public figure ladies automatically assume business when a colleague comes knocking.  
GG: well, HERES some business for you…………..  
TT: …………………………………..  
GG: ………………………………………………………………….  
TT: ……………………………………………………………………………………  
GG: ………………  
GG how was your day?? :P  
TT: Fine.  
TT: It’s getting chillier these days. My mother is determined to build a new reputation for me as Lil Michelin: Son of the Stay Puft.  
TT: She has taken it upon herself to send me packing with no less than two (2) jackets, a scarf that might very well be three (3) yards long, oh, and it would be a travesty to forget the mittens.  
GG: oh nooooo, the mittens!!!!!!!  
TT: That is exactly the appropriate amount of exclamation points for this situation.  
TT: Anyhow, they all end up shoved into my bag by three once the sun comes out, so I return home looking as though I’ve tried to sneak out of the building with half the school’s library squirreled away in there.  
TT: My shoulder doesn’t hurt at all.  
GG: :o  
GG: i wish i could sympathize but i have no idea what seasons are like, lol  
GG: sounds pretty complicated to have HALF your wardrobe be useless part of the year. what is even the point of that!!!  
TT: Those pesky revolutions of the Earth, how they trifle with the fashion tastes of a simple girl who only desires to look… trendy.  
GG: you know what you have to do rose!!! you have to fight the sun!!!!!  
TT: Hold on.  
TT: TG is bothering me.  
GG: is he really??? doesnt he know youre a very important public figure lady??  
TT: If only he understood that my preferred topics of discussion are tax exemption and whatever my agent has booked for me next.  
TT: It’s such a hassle having people who “like” you and want to “hear about your day.”  
GG: hahaha  
GG: maybe if talking to the common folks is too hard for you i can let him know that you are still recovering from human interaction and need to lay dramatically across a couch or something  
TT: While that sounds delightful, I must push on for the sake of my fans. I must keep my feet on the ground and remember that not everyone is aware of how lucky they are to be granted a slice of my time.  
GG: okay if you say so  
GG: but i can tell you actually really like talking to dave and that he doesnt bother you at all  
GG: i think he is the only one who can match your twisty turny way of talking!!! as if you think no one is able to understand you  
TT: You think my way of speaking is “twisty turny?”  
GG: of course  
GG: but that is just one of your many amazing qualities!!!! :D  
TT: I’m blushing.  
TT: If you aren’t careful with the nature of your correspondences, my mother will coerce a marriage contract out of that senile grandfather of yours.  
TT: My heart cannot be toyed with so easily, Jade.  
GG: shucks!!!!!!!!!! you caught me that was my plan all along ;o  
GG: but still you dont think dave is annoying in the slightest and it is super adorable that you think nobody can tell you respect him a lot  
GG: trust me i have talked about this with john many many times and we are in TOTAL agreement  
TT: Damn him, falling sway to the discourse of those bent on ruining my persona.  
TT: I’ll have to thwack him over the head once he logs in. Poor kid is still in class for two more hours.  
TT: But you could say I find Strider to be tolerable. Is that what you want to wrangle out of me?  
GG: itll do lol  
GG: anyway rose i gotta go feed bec!!!! it is past ten already ahhh DX  
TT: Does your dog have such an acute sense of time that he can’t stand to let his owner chat with someone who is a Very Big Deal?  
GG: believe it or not yes  
GG: i will “BOTHER” you later rose, tell john hi when he logs in and sorry for dragging him into the great ongoing “rose has feelings” debate!!!!  
TT: I’m marking it down in my planner as we speak.  
TT: I’ll have to reschedule my six o’clock tea, what an inconvenience. My window won’t stare contemplatively out of itself.  
TT: The things I do for you.  
GG: pfffffffffft >:P  
TT: Take care.  
GG: bye rose!!! <3 <3 <3

  
\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 10:19 --

 

     This is how your conversations always end. Never have you and Rose chatted into the night, the connection severed only because one of you was about to fall asleep at the keyboard. One of you always has something else to do, something more important that beckons you away from the screen. This is fine by you; it just means there’s more to talk about next time.

     Bec is nibbling at your hems now. If you don’t feed him soon, he might throw a tantrum and teleport the contents of the atrium to the roof. Your knees crack as you start to stand, and your dog gives an excited bark. You ruffle the top of his head.

     “Meet you upstairs,” you say. You land with a skip and a hop onto the transportalizer, and Becquerel disappears in his own personal burst of green light.

 

 

     You wake up to the rumble of rushing water and Davesprite’s arms wound python-tight around your ribs.

     It can’t be later than four in the morning. In the living room of the Lalonde’s home, the only light is the faint gray washing in from the windows. It coasts over the couch and makes it dingy in its monotones. You bury your nose in the cushions to inhale the comforting leather scent.

     In his sleep, Davesprite clenches his hands and scrapes you with his talons. You suck in a sharp inhale to keep from reacting out loud.

     LOLAR’s humid ocean has sunk into the first floor. Your forehead shines with heat, and the proximity to Davesprite’s computer server warmth makes your torso twist for relief. You squirm to lessen his grip on you, but there’s nothing to be done. He must be hanging off a cliff in whatever dream he’s lost in. Davesprite makes a sound of protest in his throat, his breath a hot puff against the back of your neck, and the progress you’ve made in wiggling loose is lost as his arms wind closer. If you don’t scramble free right now, your skin is going to melt off your bones.

     You teleport out of Davesprite’s arms with a twinge of remorse. The draft of the Green Sun cools you for only a moment, but then the soupy air pours over you again. The plop when Davesprite’s arms land on the couch cushions is barely audible. You slick the hair on your forehead back and turn on your heel. Without your torso to wrap his arms around, he curls in on himself instead. It gives him a small, shrunken look. You pad closer to the couch, kneeling down so you’re face level, and brush the feathers from his bangs. His eyebrows flinch, the sprite-sweat beading on his temples.

     “Be back soon,” you murmur.

     A cool draft draws a gasp of relief out of you when you crack the door open. White chalk yields under your feet, and then you’re heading towards the shore.

 

     Like rocks of grainy sugar, the sand crumbles between your toes and almost makes you slip as you’re edging down the slope of the island. Twice you lose your footing and snap down to grab the chalk, leaving dust on your palms. You’re suddenly five years old again, a child lifting her skirt as far as it’ll go to avoid splashing it in the tide pools. Low tide laps gently at your feet and washes the chalk away. Muscle memory shudders through you, and you close your eyes.

     Behind you, Lalonde Manor stretches high against a sky that could pass for early morning on Earth. A great span of barren rooms towers above the dome of the observatory, and the few pinpricks of windows sparkle with occasional pops of pink. For now, the ocean has almost gone dark.

     You breathe in deeply, willing yourself to detect the familiar sting of salt water. None comes. Actually, it smells like pool water, all chemicals and chlorine. Bitter and artificial. You take a few steps into the water, and clouds of murky white bloom around your feet. No shells, no darting fish, no flashes of life disappearing into the shelter of the sand. Cetus has sucked her sea dry.

     The water licks at your shins as you wade in deeper. It’s cold and yielding, nothing like the tangy resistance of your Pacific ocean, full of life and kicking against the force of its only land dweller. This ocean is pliant as bath water, and your waist is submerged before you even think to shed your leggings, the post-birthday cardigan Nanna forced over your head for fear you’d catch pneumonia. (You didn’t expect her to resist knitting you something, did you?) They peel away like wrapping paper, disappearing in a crackle that hiccups against the water.

     A dull roar fills all four of your ears when your head disappears underwater. Something like your own blood coursing through your veins, something like the great inhalations of a denizen deep in the trenches, something like an oncoming train. Courtesy of Becquerel, you siphon the oxygen molecules from the water and draw them toward your face, pushing the water out and leaving an invisible helmet of breathable air in its place. The droplets shine green each time you turn your head, your breath almost echoing against the liquid wall. You blink to adjust to the darkness.

     Inside the ocean of LOLAR, the color fans out like mist the deeper you go. As the rain hits the sea, it globs toward the surface, too viscous to dissolve, and so the water you swim in is a deep, nearly uninterrupted blue. In the murky depths, you spy a great cluster of towering sponges in a lifeless coral reef, stained yellow and pink from the rain that’s sunken this far. It looks like skeletal scaffolding, nothing darting between rags of scraggly seaweed. You don’t know whether or not the chill you feel is from the water.

     It’s surreal, being able to see the island drop into a black, unfathomable trench. You only ever opened your eyes underwater once at home – a mistake you’d never repeat. Bec licked your cheeks for hours as the tears streamed down your face, stinging with salt. And so whatever was beneath the rippling blue was cut off to you, left wide open to the imagination. For a while you’d muse that it was infested with sea serpents, dragons with poisonous breath that made the water burn like acid. You wonder if the Pacific was ever this terrifyingly _deep_.

     Your world has become vast and empty, and suddenly you feel much less powerful than before. If the ocean swallowed you right now, no one would ever know.

     Maybe until the battleship crashed, anyway. It’s nice to know your absence would be noted.

 

     You swim deeper, your arms pushing apart swaths of water that push back against you. Plumes of gold and magenta flower from spaces in the rock. They’re coming from underwater geysers, spewing the pigment that will someday end up in LOLAR’s sky. Which will then be made sticky with the thick vapor of the yellow clouds, which will then gel at the surface of the sea until it breaks apart and finally dissolves. And deep in the crust, hot rivers of liquid like printer ink are waiting to start the cycle over again. The only part of this planet that makes sense.

     The submerged rock faces of the chalk islands are behind you now, and below you stretches only empty sea. The ocean floor is hazy in its depth. You train your eye on what manages to poke through the blurry gray, and finally you recognize the rot of a decaying ship. Its helm hangs on by splinters, a design like a tortoise shell carved into it. Its mast is buffeted by the current, too tattered to resist, and clumps of dying algae still cling to the holey planks at the bottom. Like a cracked egg, the ship has been felled by some force that’s chopped it down the middle. You have an idea of what that might have been.

     It takes little effort to peer into Cetus’ corner of the trenches. She’s made her den in the crags of an underwater fissure, the remains of an ancient tectonic shift. Tunnels of basalt are riddled with the driftwood of innumerable shipwrecks, tiny pink shells collecting sand and rocks in their bellies. And at the center of the labyrinth, miles out to sea, the rock rises up like a mountain and houses the planet’s sleeping denizen. Exiting the Incipisphere has lulled her into a temporary stupor – the way online game characters seize up every time the WiFi shorts. Cetus sleeps in the stagnant water that gurgles up from LOLAR’s depths. Ships’ masts and chests spilling over with tarnished silver jab into her flesh, but she seems entirely unbothered. Her face is sharp, nothing human about it besides maybe the curvature of her mouth. Every rising breath makes her body shimmer white and lavender, a convulsing sea slug with its skin seeping slime. She’s almost iridescent; you wonder how camouflaged she must have been while she was prowling the oceans for her next meal. An exhale like a sigh leaves her nostrils, and the anemone-like tendrils running down her neck ripple in turn. Cetus curls her tail in, her massive cerata huddled close to her like birds’ wings.

     It’s hard to guess what role Rose’s denizen played in all of this. Would she know about your deal with Echidna? If she woke up right now, would she recognize you, thank you in an eldritch language for saving her from the meteors?

     No, you think not. She’d probably just eat you.

 

     As you approach the surface, you let the ocean close in and take over your helmet of oxygen. It rushes in to claim your face, your hair, and when your head meets the air above the ocean, you take in deep gulps of oxygen. You feel colder than before. Your hair clings to the back of your neck, heavy black strands that feel like fingers on your skin. The sensation makes it hard not to dunk your head back underwater, just to watch it all dance like kelp. Slowly, you let the muscles in your body relax, and your legs rise to poke out of the water. Pink and yellow yields to your slick skin, and ribbons of soapy pastel mimic the outline of your body as it rises above water.

     The sea still rushes in your ears, and as your gaze travels to the atmosphere, it gives the impression that a colossal storm is on its way. Your limbs spread out as you will your body to float, and you imagine letting the storm wash you away to a far-off continent.

     Water ebbs gently at your skin, and it’s been so long since you’ve felt _this_ at ease that you can’t even call it the first time in a while. It feels like the first time ever.

     Beyond the haze of LOLAR’s atmosphere, the other lands are revolving like a mobile in your darkened room. Only inches away, just out of reach, though from your spot it looks like lightyears. With the sharpness of your canid sight, you can see how delicately they turn in their revolutions ‘round the battlefield. There’s a hole punched into your makeshift solar system where the Land of Wind and Shade has excused itself, and the deep pitch it leaves behind makes your throat sting. You feel the tears glaze over your eyes, you feel the tracks they leave as they escape down the curve of your cheeks, but you can barely tell the difference between them and the seawater still clinging to your face.

     Hard to imagine that you haven’t lost anything bigger than the size of a baseball.

 

     Back ashore, your legs feel impossibly heavy. Chalk clings to your wet skin, making you look as though you’re treading through the snow. The colors of the ocean stick between the spaces of your fingers like dish soap, and you flick your hands to free them. Lalonde Manor looks the same as before. Why did you expect it to change?

     You make your perch on a boulder that has salted over from countless high tides, making it grainy and white. Your legs hang off the sides, content to let the air warm you up as you wring your hair out. Streams of water escape the strands. Combing your fingers through your hair, you start to ease them into a fishtail braid down your shoulder. The smell of the sterile sea clings to it, and you inhale the scent as you twist the limp curls of your hair.

     You’re so trained on the whisper of the water that you don’t hear the front door shut behind you. Davesprite appears in your periphery, and your yelps of reaction are out of synch – your hands fly to your neck in fright, and the squawk of fear that escapes him is a reaction to your own. Oh, and you hadn’t realized – he might be startled that you really aren’t wearing much at all.

     “Uh, fuck, sorry! I didn’t notice,” he stutters. “I’ll just. I mean. I can go back? I should go back.”

     He starts to turn, the end of his tail crackling with nerves, and you draw your legs toward your chest.

     “You know, I don’t really care if you see.” It’s not a lie, though you’re not sure why. Didn’t he tell you you’d stop caring at one point? You figured he meant about the timeline in general – it seemed impossible that you’d ever stop mourning your mistakes. But maybe your standards of etiquette have gone down as well. Or maybe once someone’s been crashing in your room for eight months, it doesn’t seem like so much of a bother if you’re not fully dressed.

     It doesn’t really matter, does it.

     You finish your braid and zap a ponytail holder into your hand, twisting it into your hair. “But if it makes you uncomfortable….”

     You swipe a sundress from the back of your closet, and it takes seconds for the fabric to settle as it materializes around your figure. When it does, it clings to your skin, staticy with teleportation. Sailor Moon who?

     His line of sight returns to you, though his cheeks still burn. “Having a midnight swim, I take it.”

     “More or less.”

     Davesprite blinks, and you know from experience that he’s trying to get the blobs of bright green to disappear from under his eyelids. He rubs his knuckle under one of his eyes, passing it off as being tired. His feathers rise and settle to follow the inhale and exhale of his yawn.

     “There room on that rock?”

     You climb up to a higher perch, crossing your ankles in front of you. Davesprite’s claws scrape the boulder’s layer of salt. He stretches his wings out, and you hear the quiet brush of the primaries against the chalk.

     “I wonder if it’s possible for feathers to sweat.”

     “It’s pretty humid in there, huh.”

     “Yeah, I can see why you bailed. I was just wondering where you went.”

     “Not very far.” His yawns are contagious, and you cover the one that leaves you with your hand. “I only wanted to get my feet wet.”

     He flicks your ear where the tufts of white are still wet. “Looks like you got more than your feet.”

     “I never said it went according to plan.”

     Davesprite sighs through his teeth and rests his chin on your shoulder. You lean towards him, and his face comes to rest in the crook of your neck.

     “You smell like chalk,” he murmurs. You take one of his arms from his lap and move it to yours, running your fingers over the leathery plates. His fingers fidget – always nervous that his “dinosaur hands” are going to scratch you up.

     “I wonder why.”

     The strands that escape your braid start to curl at your ears as they dry. Davesprite rests his forehead against your hair, his skin cooling as he begins to fall asleep. Something nags in the back of your mind, though it’s hard to pin just what. You continue to stare out over the water, dull gray reflecting on the surface, and you finally realize what it is.

     It’s that part of you still expects a sunrise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if u thought there was any sort of metaphor with jades recurring Nighttime Claustrophobia - its not that deep


	32. Chapter 32

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 03 December, 2009

 

     Sometimes you want to open The Weather Channel just to see if it’ll recognize your location and give you a ten-day forecast. You can imagine it now – every day is represented by an icon of an erupting volcano. The low for today is Post-50k Marathon Heat Stroke˚; the high is Fuck You˚.

     Last night you killed two basilisks and an ogre. The grist they produced was enough to alchemize several more packages of bottled water – all clones of the first crinkled bottle you found under Bro’s desk. As much as it pains you, your resources will have to be spent on beverages that aren’t derived from apples. On your way out here, you killed fifteen – sixteen? Sixteen imps, four basilisks, and no ogres. You could have killed a lich queen, but at the last minute you decided she was too big and fucked off. She could have scored you a whole mess of grist. It’s not too late to get the time tables out and go after her again, but you don’t remember finding any of your own corpses where she first appeared.

     Last week you alchemized a wristband to count the miles you travel from home. You’ve already pushed up your sleeves as far as they’ll go (you’ll cut your feet off before you’ll be a big enough tool to wear a tank top), so a glance at your wrist tells you you’re 3.4 miles from what’s left of your apartment tower. Yesterday you went northeast. Today, you travel northwest.

     If you cut the crap for a minute, you’d realize that your bro is gonna be impossible to track down unless he’s already dying of dehydration somewhere. There’s a chance you’ve sweated out too many brain cells to tell a good idea from a shit one. Anyway, eighth time’s the charm, right? You haven’t actually planned out what you’re going to do once you find him. Maybe give him one of the water bottles you always keep in your backpack, saved for him in case you run into each other. Maybe yell at him until your voice goes hoarse(r). Then what?

     You’ll cross that bridge when you get to it.

     Your face shines with sweat, iShades steaming up with the heat that rises from the lava. You’ve reached a skeletal city of iron scrap, and far under your feet, the gears of LOHAC are churning away. The horrible grinding echoes in your ears, a rusted cacophony. No cryptic NPCs have coughed up any maps yet, your planet doesn’t come with Metro schedules, and Siri has no idea where the fuck you are. You could turn back now, trudge the 3.4 mile walk of defeat back to your apartment and chug a six-pack of Dasani. But he’s out there, damn it, you _know_ he is, and all your problems will be solved once you find him. He’ll know what to do, he’ll know where to go. It’s a weird instinct of his, not unlike his uncanny ability to predict when the next bus will be turning the corner.

     He’s just testing you. He’s just evaluating how far you can cross a foreign terrain, how much unbearable heat you can withstand, how many days you’re able to go without food. You’ll continue for a few more miles, and if you can’t find him, you’ll turn back and go southeast. You’re not _stupid_ , after all. He has to be somewhere.

     Somewhere in the metal scaffolding, you hear your sprite calling. Shit almighty, and you’d thought Calsprite quit following you the last time you bashed him over the head with your backpack. Cal skims the surface of the red sea, Icarian, and his feathers go unscathed by the flames. He hoots and hollers as he weaves between poles of iron, and the sound echoes until it’s all you can focus on. That stupid fucking sprite, stupid, fucking, god….

     Your mouth is so dry. You fumble with the half-empty bottle in your side pocket, fingers trembling on the cap. What comes out is horribly warm, but you chug it anyway. Three more bottles left with you. Four if you include Bro’s. Your mouth is still dry, and your head is pounding. You sway on your feet, grab a jagged scrap of bony steel. Cal’s cackling grates in your head, and an atrocious, oppressive _heat_ presses down on you like hands.

     Only 3.4 miles from home.

 

           

     “Dave? I know you’re awake.”

     Your heart spasms, thumping wildly as you continue to hear the hooting of your godawful predecessor. Jade is hovering over you when you open your eyes. Your feathers rise up, and a yelp of surprise comes out stutteringly. Jade’s hands fly away from your face.

     “Did I startle you?”

     You massage your chest, heartrate still pounding. You can still feel where she was patting your cheeks to wake you up. “Sh—shit. No, just jumpy. Too much cake.”

     You were both unwilling to return to the Lalonde’s couch last night. You thought that coming back to your regularly ventilated room would give your brain a rest, but you guess you should know by now that the Suffering Train never stops for nothin’.

     “Well, in this case, you won’t like what I have to tell you.” She must feel how hard your chest is quaking, because she leans down to peck you on the corner of your mouth. Her braid is still damp; the stray hair tickles your face and makes you scrunch up your nose.

     “Break the news to me, Doc. How many months I got left.”

     “Nanna sent me to go fetch you. She wants to talk to you.”

     You rub your eyes, your entire torso heaving with the sigh you produce. “Uh, okay.”

     “It probably has something to do with what day it is.” Jade rests her hand on your forearm. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

     “Thanks. Hard to forget the ole Freak Meteor Anniversary.”

     She squeezes your arm, and you take it as your cue to straighten up and slump out of bed. She lies down to occupy the space you leave behind – still too tired to face the day. You flash her a peace sign as you unlatch the door to leave, and she responds by shooting a single finger gun your way.

 

     It’s too early for the nocturnal Dersites to be crawling out of their hidey-holes, so the carapacians you pass on the way to the kitchen are of Prospit. They’re more in their element on this golden ship – you and Jade frequent the deck less often now that they’ve adopted it as their new afternoon hangout. Two hallways from your destination, two Prospitians almost rope you into a rec room, where a pair of chess folk are arguing over a move one of them has made in chess. You throw your hands up in apology, insisting you don’t know anything about moderating this kind of game, and drift away wondering if chess is their version of Life.

     The kitchen’s double doors are locked from the inside. A sigh hisses through your teeth. Nanna has done this more than once, making you both phase through the wall to get to your dinner. “Clumsy mistake,” she calls it. Yeah, right. It takes a bit of finagling with your sprite code to make yourself immaterial. Start > Settings > Appearance > Screen resolution > 50%. Your vision goes citrusy orange, and everything is rendered transparent enough to see shadows moving beyond the walls. You slip through the doors.

     And it’s empty. With no one inside, the lights have been killed, leaving the room lit only by the streams of green that come in from the portholes. The cafeteria is eerie in its silence. Without the benches and tables clattering with metal against exoskeleton, you feel you’ve entered the Forbidden City.

     “Yo,” you start. “Anyone home?”

     The sink drips.

     “Come on, don’t mess with me. I’ve got fragile constitutions.”

     Boilers rumble under the floor, and the vent releases a cloud of warm air. You’re ready to plop down at the kitchen island and wait patiently to be ambushed, but then the locks pop open, and you grit your teeth as your feathers puff up. You can feel them brush your jawline.

     Nanna is poking her head through the door. She adjusts her glasses to look at you.

     “I don’t live in here, you know!” she says.

     “Can you blame me for assuming.”

     Nanna laughs at this, and she jerks her hand towards her to beckon you out of the room.

     “Follow me.”

 

     In the hallway, you keep your eyes trained on the curlicue at the end of Nanna’s sprite tail, too conflicted on what to say. The cache of topics for small talk that pops up in your head is unsuitable for her age range. You wind farther and farther away from the kitchen, and it isn’t until you’re in a vastly unpopulated corridor that Nanna begins to speak.

     “Are you excited to be fourteen?”

     Your first instinct is to say _not really_. It feels like you should be turning fifteen instead – do loops count as extra hours lived if you’re still stuck in the same gap in time?

     “I guess so.”

     “If you ask me, I think your fortune will be looking up. Out with unlucky thirteen, in with lucky fourteen.”

     You run your thumbs over your talons. “What makes fourteen any better?”

     “Divisible by seven, of course.”

     Nanna leads you up a tightly-wound spiral staircase. You suck your breath in to draw your wings closer together. The stairs spit you out in a thin hallway of the sleeping quarters no one was willing to move into – the ones saved for the generals, the admirals, the lieutenants. It has an air of foreboding, like it would be roped off with velvet if this ship were a tourist attraction. Please do not touch the furniture. She’s made her room at the end of the hall, and a window paints you green and yellow as Nanna unlocks the door. It groans open, the steel thick enough to serve as the entry to a bank vault. A smell of cinnamon and hotel blankets comes out.

     “Now, let’s see if your present hasn’t disappeared under a mess of yarn,” she mutters, half to herself. “That cat loves playing in the stuff too much for his own good.”

     Despite having all her personal possessions in life reduced to ash, Nanna’s room is anything but sparse. For a moment you’re convinced you’re in some quaint little English cottage, doilies and all. Whoever occupied this room before her must have been a big deal – only one bed is standing, and the mattress is so stacked with quilts that it looks like anyone would immediately sink upon sitting. A desk lamp has been switched on, and it shines soft light on a sleek little desk by the window. She’s appropriated the old inhabitant’s desk calendar, filling all of the month’s boxes – god knows how. There’s no closet, but a massive cupboard dwarfs the desk and makes Nanna seem significantly frailer. She’s rummaging inside of it now, and you hear the scrape of wicker baskets shifting around. She folds something over her arm, but you can’t exactly tell what it is.

     “Would you mind trying this on?” Nanna asks. “One size fits all, but it’s always trickier when your client has wings. Here, lift your arms.”

     “Uh, sure….”

     You squeeze your eyes shut, and she drapes something fleecy over your head. It falls to rest on either side of you, and your wings flex as they escape the slits on the side. You start to raise your hand and fix your hair, but Nanna stops you so she can button the front.

     “I’ll admit, these are just for show, but I couldn’t hand it off without giving it that extra flair.” She slips two buttons through slits on the other half, giving the illusion that there’s a diagonal slit down the front. “Well, happy birthday, dear! Take a look.”

     You spread your arms and peer down. No other word to describe it – Nanna’s made you a fucking poncho. It’s in dark shades of red, and as you examine the buttons, you see that they’re made to look like little red gears. The outline is mimicked along the neckline. You thumb the collar, knightlike in its cut, and it occurs to you that she’s made this to imitate a god tier getup. But it’s toasty as hell, and you draw your arms in to feel the fabric on the inside. You are pretty sure you’ll never be cold again.

     “I look like a f— like an elven spirit mage or something.” You twist your torso side to side to make the hems dance.

     “That’s the idea!”

     “It’s so flowy. I seriously love it.”

     Satisfied, Nanna shoos you to a guest chair that looks like it’s only been sat in once in the last century. You hide your hands under the poncho’s front so she can’t see how your fingers are fidgeting. She coasts to a long table against the wall that you didn’t notice when you came in – a doily the size of your wing is draped over each side, and an electric tea kettle puffs steam in the middle of it. Ever ready for the Queen of English to come calling, Nanna opens a drawer behind the doily and pulls out two dainty teacups, the saucers rimmed with bright blue. You clear your throat.

     “So, um. How did you know when our birthdays were?”

     There’s the soft sound of tea being poured. Nanna doesn’t answer until she’s handed you your cup on a saucer, and even then she doesn’t sigh with contemplation until she’s settled on her day bed. Her cyan tail curls up, and a spoon materialized from her sprite powers stirs her tea. You sniff at your cup tentatively, unwilling to tell her you’ve never had tea before. It smells like lavender.

     “John told me, of course.”

     You swallow hard, and you force down a gulp of tea so you can think of a response. It tastes bitter and earthy, but you guess that’s what you should expect from literal leaf juice.

     “Oh.” You start to say something else, but this is all you can come up with.

     “I didn’t even need to ask. He told me as soon as you were both out of earshot, so I’d have plenty of time to plan.” Nanna’s cup clinks as it rests in its saucer.

     “Really?”

     “Of course. You didn’t think he’d want to celebrate your birthdays?”

     You shrug.

     “I suppose you thought I discerned the truth through my all-seeing eye of sprite knowledge, then?” She taps the earpiece of her glasses with her index finger.

     “Yeah, ‘all-seeing.’ Like SBURB didn’t give us mile-wide blind spots just to keep everyone groping in the dark.”

     “It gets harder once you’re free of the Medium, isn’t it?” Nanna asks. “Suddenly being so ignorant of what’s going on around you. Not being able to help.”

     Your mouth twitches. “Hard to compare. We helped them for less than a day. I’ve had my head in the sand for much longer.”

     Over on the writing desk, a gilded clock counts the seconds with faint ticks. Your hands tighten around your cup, heating up your palms.

     “Did you feel it, when the meteors were startin’ to come down? During the Reckoning,” you start. “Did you feel like you… _had_ to go to Skaia? Like it was shootin’ off all these invisible flares that made it all kinds of appealing?”

     Nanna exhales and lets go of her saucer. It hovers in place, held up by strings as she brushes the white curls from her forehead. They’re not even disturbing her sight – she’s simply fidgeting with them.

     “It didn’t feel that way at the time,” she replies. “But yes, you could say I felt drawn to the battlefield.”

     “Why do you think you did?”

     Nanna considers this, looking up at the ceiling as she bobs her head noncommittally. “Perhaps we were being called back to our maker. Skaia gave us the gift of resurrection – it could be we felt compelled to comfort our creator on its deathbed.” Then she shrugs. “Or maybe I’m spinning a tall tale out of nothing. Who can know for sure?”

     “So you didn’t feel like you went there for any reason.”

     The end of her tail flicks. “I’d go anywhere if someone told me my child was there.”

     You feel your back molars clench together, but then Nanna shrugs her shoulders and takes another sip. You mimic her motion absentmindedly, and you start to taste the lavender. It stays in your mouth even after you lick your lips.

     “Even if he wasn’t, I still would have gone. It was just so… _blue_.” Nanna blinks a few times and returns to her tea.

     Your chest feels concaved, and now more than ever, you wish you had legs just so you could bob one of them to release your anxiety. You spin your cup in your hands and look up at her sheepishly.

     “What’s gonna happen to us?”

     She returns your stare with a soft look, and the fine lines around her mouth rearrange as she gives you a small smile.

     “I don’t know,” she answers.

 

     Older isn’t always wiser after all. You’ve been itching to ask Nanna this for months – whether it’s normal to feel that Skaia is beckoning you into the belly of the beast, whether it’s okay to feel as though if you got hit by a meteor, well, that would be just _dandy_. Who else were you going to ask, the cat who wants to gnaw out your esophagus? Your innards seem to pool in your gut with the sheer weight of them. “Disappointed” doesn’t cover it.

     “Are you okay with that?”

     “Okay with what, dear?”

     You raise your hand to fiddle with your earlobe, looking at the bolts on the floor. “Are you okay with not knowing? Like, wouldn’t you want to?”

     Nanna laughs a little and shakes her head. “You know what? I’m at peace with it. I grew up with people who would consider this second life of mine an abomination. There’s a chance they’re right! But I’ve lived my life, and I’ve had my fun. I’m _having_ fun with this eclectic little bunch. And I’m content to help you kids along for as long as Skaia wills me.” Her mouth thins into a straight line.

     “I don’t even know why I’m mad. I prototyped my own damn self.” You tighten your jaw, and something in your temple pounds. “Maybe you’d be less comfortable with it if there was a more relevant version of you running around with their ‘plot armor’ and ‘functioning legs.’”

     She gives a tiny hoot, grabs her teacup again and hides her smile behind it. “Oh, but there is!”

     Your eyebrows knit together. “What?”

     Nanna titters again and takes a long sip. “Whoops – cat’s out of the bag.”

     “I. What….?”

     “Maybe you should ask Jade.”

     You glare into your cup and watch the dark tea slosh around. You don’t know what’s more alarming – the idea of a secret being kept from you, or the fact that Nanna refuses to say anything else. Classic harlequin hijinks. A feeling like an itch spreads down the back of your arms. You’re still staring at nothing as Nanna pushes herself upright. The tea kettle huffs when she goes to refill her cup, and then the lid of an aluminum cookie tin chirps as she peels it open. She rests it on the little coffee table that barely comes halfway up your chair. You’re suddenly too tired to claim one.

     “And by the way, Dave… I really don’t think she’ll ever stop blaming herself for what happened.” She settles back on her nest of quilts, and the mattress springs groan. You don’t say anything. Nanna’s voice goes as quiet as you think capable, so soft that you think you’ve done something.

     “He was my son, you know.”

     She pops a cookie in her mouth and stares out the porthole. A flash of gold streaks by, and it brightens the color of the walls.

     “I was looking forward to raising them. One child is better than none, though, wouldn’t you say?” She sighs. “But it weighs on you when your only living child is in such turmoil, and you can’t do anything about it.” The beads dangling from her glasses click together weakly as she pushes them up her face. “It’s funny how SBURB fulfills our wishes in the most roundabout of ways. I always wanted a girl, when I was still young.”

     The only words that occur to you are the classic _I’m sorry_ , but it seems so trite that you keep your mouth shut.

     “And now, rather than getting to know my own daughter on normal terms, I have to watch as she just… drifts away further than she was before.” Nanna stirs her tea, the tip of the spoon grinding against the bottom. “What I mean to say is, you two need to look after each other. Don’t go off by yourselves. Don’t hold your troubles inside. Keep each other grounded so the sadness doesn’t sweep you away.”

     You nod slowly, and your voice comes out lower than expected. “Okay. I’ll try.”

 

     It’s hard to remember the last time an adult tried to give you a pep talk. It was probably the middle school counselor. She had a basket of stress balls next to her chair, the fabric pattern faded from how many sweaty adolescents had sat in it before you. You held onto a spongy hot air balloon and squeezed the life out of it as she asked you what you wanted to do after high school.

     “If we’re being real with each other, Miss, if I could skip out on high school, I would.”

     You don’t remember what she responded with. She probably tilted her head and folded her hands over her crossed legs, asked in her professional voice _why you thought that was_? Something about her voice grated on you, like behind her face of Adult Concern you could tell she was just waiting for school to get out. Counting down the seconds before you fucked off out of her office so she could root through her mini-fridge for her Panera salad. You don’t get that vibe from Nanna.

 

     “Y’know, it’s weird,” you say at last. “I’m not really used to people older than me givin’ me sound counsel.”

     Nanna smiles a little. “I find that hard to imagine.”

     “Join the club, I guess.”

     “Dave, do you mind if I asked you a question?”

     “Shoot.”

     “Who did you grow up with?”

     The corners of your mouth twitch downward. “I lived with my brother. Or, um. I guess he was actually my dad?” You shrug. “It’s kinda weird adjusting to that, still. Guy probably didn’t mentally grow up past twenty, so I guess it makes more sense to refer to him as a sibling. His parental instincts were kinda lackluster.” You bite your bottom lip before you keep babbling.

     “I see.” Nanna adjusts her perch and smooths out a wrinkled corner of her quilt. “Did you worry about who your parents must have been?”

     “Uh. Sometimes, maybe. After a while I think I just stopped caring. He did pretty well for himself, I mean. It’s not like a bizarre absence of parental figures really impeded on anything.” You scratch the side of your nose. “Sometimes I wondered if he was actually my brother at all. Like maybe some homeless lady dropped a baby at his doorstep thinkin’ that whoever could afford a penthouse in downtown Houston must be super qualified to raise children. We didn’t look too much alike.”

     Nanna nods. “I felt the same – being unsure whether my family was really my family, that is. Turned out in the end that they weren’t! My brother was not my brother, and as for my mother, _well_.”

     The clock on the desk chimes faintly to announce the hour.

     “I wasn’t much older than you, when I found out. It’s a tad embarrassing… for a while I would imagine what must have happened for us to be spirited away from our families, to be arranged neatly into the illusion of one.” She whisks her finger under her chin, looking at some point beyond you. Her cheeks are tinged with a bluish hue. “In any case, I understand. We didn’t look anything like the other.”

     “What happened to him?”

     She blinks, as if she had forgotten you were in the room.

     “He ran away when we were young. I never saw him after that.”

     “Sorry.”

     She half-shrugs and smooths out the collar of her tunic. “It was a very long time ago. Nothing to be sorry for.”

     “I tried to run away when I was ten. I was only gone for an hour.” Your tea is starting to chill, so you take a long sip to gather your thoughts. “I don’t remember why I did it. Probably for some stupid reason, like maybe my bro ate the last of the Bagel Bites or something. I put a four-pack of apple juice and a couple of jeans into my backpack and took the elevator all the way down, then waited by the bus stop for… god, a while. But I guess traffic was jammed for some reason, because the bus was so late that I just forgot why I was mad and went home. He acted like I hadn’t left. Maybe he _didn’t_ notice.”

     Nanna snorts. “I wish I could say my own brother was so easily swayed. Alas, that was not what fate had in store for him. He even took the dog.” Her tail unravels, then curls again in the opposite direction. “Not as if I could blame him.”

     “Why’d he bail, anyway.”

     “You could say our domestic situation was less than ideal.”

     “Oh.”

     You’re not sure which of you is the troubled student and which is the one with the mini-fridge.

     “I suppose that’s what happens when you slap a couple of children together into the same household and raise them under the misconstrued ideas you have about how humans rear their young.” Nanna’s ghost hand travels to your side of the room to snag a cookie from the tin, and you have to bite your tongue to keep from ruining the somber mood and bursting into laughter.

     “Yeah, ‘misconstrued’ is one way to put it.”

     “I think in my case, it was much more literal.” Nanna chips away at the cookie’s crust before she eats the center. “The woman who raised me was enduring quite a bit of culture shock. She simply didn’t know how to handle children. But if that were the only issue in our picture, the boy she called my brother might have stayed.” She dips the cookie’s nibbled center into her tea cup and finishes the whole thing. “Come to think of it, it may have been the knife incident that sent him packing in the end.”

     “Knife incident?”

     In some strange way, you can tell Nanna is excited to tell this story. Perhaps, like you, she’s become desensitized by prototyping. She straightens her posture and clears her throat.

     “Our family had a massive back yard. It used to be occupied by a neighboring forest, but a meteor wiped out the trees. And while we might have lost a wonderful view from our bedroom windows, the incident left us with a marvelous expanse of grass. The dog loved it. Well, the _point_ is, we had a woodshed in the back trees. It went unused for its intended purposes – we had gardeners come in every week to keep her hydrangeas in check. So really, it only served as a breeding ground for spiders and centipedes.”

     “Where’s the knife come into this?”

     Nanna raises her finger and looks at you over the rim of her glasses. “Patience.”

     “Sorry.”

     “The woman who raised us was big on baking. I can still feel it, every time I open a new packet of flour – the smell of dough from the back kitchen, and the wires in the stove popping with heat. Though the house was teeming with staff, we never had anyone working in the kitchen – she insisted on doing it all herself, with a protective ferocity that suggested she thought anyone else would poison her. Naturally, it was a pastime she instilled in me. I’d say it was the only true gift I received from her!

     “For nearly every meal of the day, I would be down there with her. Even when I was too short to see over the counter, she’d set up a stepladder so I could help her crack the eggs. It was one of her favorite parts. She loved hearing the shell shatter and the yolk spill out. It made the egg seem like it was still alive.” Nanna purses her lips with a look of distaste, as if the memories that come to her are out of her control.

      “It happened when we were sixteen. It must have been May – I hadn’t been sixteen for long. We were making dinner, and it was very tense between us that night. If I recall correctly, it was because we found the dog tied to the flagpole earlier in the morning. It rained the night before, so he was absolutely quaking with cold. In her own twisted thought process, she was probably punishing my brother for a forgettable stunt he pulled the same day. Whatever her reasoning, I was still livid with her for putting an innocent life on line, all so she could feel she one-upped a child.

     “While we prepared dinner, we hardly spoke. I saw her watching me out of the corner of her eye, silently daring me to say something. I had a terrible habit of speaking out of turn when I was smaller, but by this point I knew better. I knew that she wanted me to fight her, so I kept my mouth shut. I even tried to pretend she wasn’t there.” Nanna rests her eyes, and you almost think she’s fallen asleep. But then they flutter open again, and she looks deflated. “I still smell it. I was chopping cloves of garlic. She reached across the cutting board to fetch a cheese grater, and when I raised my knife, I nicked the underside of her arm.

     “It was as though time slowed down. I barely felt the knife graze her skin, but it felt like hours before she drew her arm back. I dropped the knife immediately – if I groveled enough, perhaps she would forgive me. Perhaps she’d only send me to my room. She didn’t even look at me, just clenched her fingers ‘round her arm, her gritted teeth a dazzling _white_. Then her eyes darted to the cutting board, and she grabbed the knife like that.” Nanna snaps her fingers. “She wasn’t fast enough, though. I still saw the blood.”

     The clock keeps ticking, and Nanna trails off.

     “So… what was wrong with the blood?”

     She looks at you with a blank expression. “Nothing, dear. Blood is only blood.”

     “Did the shed have anything to do with this, or…?”

     “Ah, yes. The shed.” Nanna smooths out the quilts again, though they’re creased perfectly already. “The shed is where I spent that night. It was a common punishment in our household – the cellar was dungeon-like as it was, but it was too warm with the heat given off by the furnace. The shed was more in line with how she wanted us to feel while we were in exile.

     “It still had all the rusted shovels and hoes and rakes that we used to have before she hired the gardeners. We would have to crouch between the yard tools and hope that whenever we crawled out, a spider hadn’t made a new nest in our hair. In the end, I got lucky. At least it was almost summer.”

     Your skin crawls, and Nanna notices your reaction. Her mouth forms a little V.

     “Arachnophobic?”

     “Nah. Claustrophobic, maybe.”

     “Perfectly understandable.” Nanna tucks a curl of white hair behind her ear. “My brother was the one who fetched me the next day. She never collected us herself, always sent one of us to release the other. He brushed the cobwebs out of my hair and helped me shake the pebbles out of my shoes. And before the end of the week, he was gone.”

     Neither of you speak. You have nothing to say, and nothing to feel except the idea that you’ve been exaggerating your problems for the past eight months, or twelve months, or twenty months. They’ve expanded in the hot air of your absence from your guardian, and now you only feel terribly confused.

 

     “My! That certainly got away from me, didn’t it?” says Nanna. The volume of her voice startles you. She flicks her fingers as if ridding them of unpleasant crumbs, then looks to you to fill the next piece of the conversation. “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you claustrophobic?”

     “Oh. That hypothesis never got tested. Wouldn’t take many nerds to figure out what getting shoved in pantries and showers full of puppets will do to a kid’s psyche.”

     “Sorry – about that last part, you spoke too quickly. Did you say something about puppets?”

     “Uh, yeah. My bro’s ‘special interest.’ I forget that not everyone’s houses are filled with fleecy monstrosities of varying quality. He used them for most of his never-ending torrent of pranks.”

     “Oh! I love pranks!” Nanna almost claps, but with her single hand it just looks like she’s an old duchess reacting to a scandalous opera.

     “And your brand of gently-executed maternal shenanigans is always a hoot, but my apartment was a strong contender for the next setting of a _SAW_ movie.”

     “ _Gentle_?” she sniffs. “Remind me to really knock you out the next time I decide to involve you kids in shenanigans. You’ll be reeling for days, lamenting your underestimation of my prowess.”

     You try to hide your smile, but the snort that escapes you is a giveaway.

     “Maybe if you were friends with my brother, he’d be more pleasant and less determined to traumatize children.”

     “That’s sweet of you to think I’d have such a profound effect on someone,” Nanna replies. She blows the invisible steam from her already-cooled cup. “Unfortunately, some people are beyond saving past a certain age. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

     “I don’t know. I kinda wanna see how you two would square off. He’d try to do his wannabe ninja routine and attack you from a hatch in the ceiling, but you would’ve already filled the ceiling vents with comically-oversized pies. Dude would finally be forced to recognize the true master, and bam, the heart-warming road to recovery begins.” You shift your wings so that the feathers don’t crease against the edges of the chair.

     “Character redemption through the power of pranks? This is a movie I’d like to see produced.” She settles back, posture a bit relaxed. “You’ll have to storyboard it.”

     “Yeah.” You finish the rest of your tea, willing yourself not to grimace at its chill. “Sorry. I’m just gonna shut up now.”

     Nanna tilts her head. “What, and deprive a poor old woman of your delightful company?”

     You click your talons on the saucer. “I mean, I think I’m on the verge of babbling. I don’t ever know what to say when he comes up in conversation. And I think I just realized that he was a lot less terrible than I thought. At least he didn’t lock me in a shed.”

     “Oh, but Dave, it isn’t a competition. If your guardian fails you, they fail you.”

     “Okay, but… I don’t know. It feels kinda stupid getting worked up over, like, what? I didn’t get _hugged_ enough? He was a little _aggressive_? Our _fridge_ wasn’t used for actually keeping food _cold_?” You scoff and rest your cup in your lap so you can pick at the leathery skin of your arms.

     “I mean, we weren’t always on each other’s cases. We were kinda friends, y’know? Sometimes I felt really cool because he wasn’t treating me like a kid. Like, sure, this little guy can handle sharp objects and get exposed to my weird-ass websites. That won’t affect him at all, kid’s brains aren’t malleable like that.”

     “Dave….”

     “It’s just messed up that it took me _so_ long to figure out how we were different. I would see all these kids whose parents and siblings would be picking them up from school, and I don’t know, looked like they were probably eating enough? As in, they didn’t have the shelves taken out of their fridges to make room for katanas?”

     You fold your fingers and bite one of your knuckles. Nanna looks at you with crinkled eyebrows, and the milky pupil of her slashed eye almost disappears in the shadow across her face.

     “I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about him now. He’s dead, so he can’t defend himself. But ever since me and Jade went to Rose’s house, I can’t stop imagining how different I would’ve been if I lived somewhere else. And it sucks, because I saw this dude _die_. We fought Jack to the death together, and here I am moping around thinking about… whatever.”

     Far below, the boilers kick off. The room is blanketed in new silence.

     “He must have thought he was doing me this huge favor, training me to swordfight and everything. But all he did was make me jumpy, and irritable, and suspicious of every little thing. I couldn’t even hear the building settle without assuming he was about to pull something demented.” Your talons scrape against your arm plates. “Maybe we would have won our session the first time if I wasn’t so impatient and conspiratory. Maybe if I trusted my friends a little more and thought things through, we wouldn’t be here.”

     You feel your cheeks warm – you knew you should’ve shut up while you had the chance. You stare at the ground while Nanna processes your words and adjusts her seating. She leans halfway over, giving the impression that she should be resting her arms on her knees.

     “None of that sounds like anything to apologize for,” she says. “Sometimes the ones who are supposed to protect us end up hurting us so badly, we feel we may never be able to trust anyone again. We may feel that we aren’t worthy of being loved or respected, because that was never afforded us, and if we couldn’t earn the instinctual love of our guardians, who else will accept us? It leaves us feeling as though we’re broken, like something in our core is inherently repulsive.”

     A dent in the cookie tin pops itself out.

     “But you have to believe me, Dave. There is always someone who cares about you and wants you to be happy. Once you surround yourself with those people… well, one day you’ll feel differently about being broken.”

     She finishes her second cup and puts it aside, nestling it between two swaths of rolled-up yarn. Her sprite spoon disappears in a fizzle of neon blue, and your throat burns.

     “A parent is supposed to love you. Their failure to do so is no reflection on your own worthiness of that affection.” She pauses until you look up at her, your mouth drawn in a tight frown. “And for the record, I think you’re a wonderful person. It isn’t hard to see why my children like you so much.”

 

     You nod and break eye contact, staring at your lap. Your breath is restricted, and when you blink, you’re surprised to feel that you’re crying. A bit runs off your chin and plinks at the shallow bottom of your teacup. How much more sentimental could you possibly get?

     “I hope you understand what I’m getting at, dear,” Nanna finally murmurs.

     “Yes, I understand.” You swipe your hand under your eyes. “Thanks.”


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its been six months of the fuckshit (chugs soda out of a 2 liter bottle)

     You fade in and out of sleep, half-dreams playing behind your eyelids and in the periphery of your subconscious before dissolving and leaving you in that familiar limbo of pseudo-waking. Twice, you drift into the shallow waters of a tentative sleep, then jolt awake when your legs spasm under the sheets, the reaction of a body that wishes to fall asleep but does not wish to fall. The hallway goes quiet, a streak of darkest green outside the window almost engulfs your room in shadow, and you try again.

     The cool feeling of slipping through soapy water, a rush of air that’s stagnant with the memories inflating it. The strange sensation of having lost your physical form, and the shock of how blackest black the outside is. All feelings that come down on you in slow motion when you enter this dream bubble.

     This is only a sparse one, dwarfed by a Jovian bubble that glimmers pink and purple not far from where you stand. Inside that distant sphere, you can see cities and treetops and flying _things_ behind the haze of the iridescent skin. You touch your fingertips to the teal wall of the orb and watch the shapes of your prints reverberate. You’re not sure what would happen if you forced your hand all the way through. A nebula of colored marbles is outside right now, and it takes seconds for you to turn around and assess the patchwork of the landscape.

 

     The memory you’ve been spat into is your own, if not distorted by the lens of a younger you. A Persian rug stretches, Broadway-like, to an altar that reaches the ceiling. Cups of candles melt wax in thick streams down the sides of the mantle, and the painting they illuminate is hidden by dancing shadow. As a small child, barely tall enough to climb onto Bec’s back without his assistance, you remember the front room appearing this grand.

     This is what you’d be getting into, if you left your session and plunged into the realm of the horrorterrors. Fortunately for you, dream bubbles are so much prettier from the outside.

     Your taffy-stretched foyer tapers into several branches of corridors, shallow light pooling from their doorways. You pad down the rug, a smell like cinder coming from a spot where it looks like the fire has singed it. The black still swallows the top half of the portrait on the altar, but from your spot on the floor you can see that your dream self has her hands folded. And although the dying fire still spits in front of you, little sparks of orange still crackling, you feel no warmth at all.

     Your eyes follow the heavy violet of your grandfather’s fireplace, and you squint to peer into the darkness of the nearest hallway. Purple light mists out of it, Halloween-like. You take a step forward, glimpsing flashes of things unrecognizable. Another memory, another organic piece of someone else – perhaps a stranger – whose psyche has merged with yours in this liminal space. You trace your fingers along the brick, sweating with condensation, and as the purple deepens and overlays you in its hue, you begin to feel very much a voyeur.

 

     A full-body shiver passes through you and makes your shoulders spasm as you enter – exit? – your home and toe slowly into a violet colonnade. The columns are of sleek obsidian, glinting with your reflection as you pass. Through the pointed arches is the projection of a Dersite city square, a massive plaza that takes your breath away with its pigment. If the sparkling gold of Prospit made your feet lighter, if it was like your springboard allowing you to fly, then the Kingdom of Darkness weighs you down with the sludge of… what? You could call it a lot of things. The shade of a cartoon king’s cape, the glowing eyes of an undiscovered benthic creature, the earliest-blooming of your sea of pansies, the… the, the, the.

     You wonder fleetingly how any dreamer of Derse could fly while pressed under the cling wrap of terrible abyssal black.

     A fountain of onyx boasts a statue of a nondescript Dersite, water pouring from their outstretched palms. You keep close to the inside of the colonnade, fearful of peering into the open. This square lacks a subconsciously projected population, no holograms of bustling carapacians, and what this tells you is that someone – the creator of this memory – is very close, and very powerful, and very psychic.

     Well, so are you, but who knows what other breed of _deus ex machina_ SBURB is capable of stitching together on a Quest Bed?

     Your eyes flutter closed. You try to see who the dreamer of this memory is, to see who _anyone_ here is, but the Green Sun sputters out like a circuit breaker and leaves your vision black. The rejection sets your nerves alight – part indignance, but mostly fear.

     Your arms skim the columns as you retreat into the shadow of the hall. Through the imitation Veil, you can still see the muddy shades of a constellation of dream bubbles. The multitude of them makes you feel dizzy – how many SBURB players does it take to screw in a universe? – but what makes your stomach sour is that you almost feel relieved. Out here, the two of you would be far from alone.

     The colonnade winds into a steep staircase and spits you out into a disheveled garden. Or maybe it’s meant to look this way, with the gnarled ivy that clings to brick and reaches out with black leaves, the twists of boxwood that tug at your ankles. You duck your head under the wilting branches of a hunched-over tree, and when you begin to hear voices, you suck in a breath and cling to the bark.

     Voices coming from the front of the garden, across a shallow bridge that leads back up into the plaza. You crouch low and look through the vegetation.

 

     She has her back to you, and in the midst of conversation she reaches back to run her hand through the blonde hair that’s been shorn short at the back. The girl shifts her weight from one foot to another, a small curve of orange changing its trajectory. You bite the inside of your mouth so hard that you’re sure it must be bleeding.

     You’d forgotten how important your friends look in their godhood-garb.

     A puff of air leaves you, and as you crunch a crooked root of the tree underfoot, the voices stop and Rose turns her head. You catch her profile (you should have figured she’d wear lipstick even on that garbage ball of a meteor), you catch the bright gold of her headband glinting in her brown roots, and if you were okay with being caught, you might catch her wide eyes locking with yours. But you’re not, so you don’t.

     Rose is still staring into the brush after you’ve stomped your heel against your other foot, and she is still searching for the sign of an eavesdropper after your dream projection melts and you leave the Furthest Ring.

 

     And Davesprite is already looking at you after you’ve gasped awake. The noise that leaves you is the quiet shudder of someone who has just gotten away with a petty crime, and it makes him turn from where his claws tap at his laptop. The look on his face is mere recognition – _hey, you’re awake_ rather than _hey, is something wrong_ – the result of too many nightmares and too many mornings of one of you jolting awake in a cold sweat to jar the other out of their sheets.

     “Hey.”

     You sit up so quickly that the blood rushes to your head and blacks your vision. A group of carapacians clunks by the door as you rub your temples.

     “Good morning.”

     “S’three, my dude.”

     “Good afternoon.”

     Davesprite has an odd look on his face, like a fly has landed on your nose and everyone’s noticed it but you. You shoot him back a _what are you looking at_ face, and it isn’t until he yields and looks back at his laptop that you notice he’s wearing a whole lot of red.

     “Is that your present?” you snicker. Davesprite fluffs out the collar and smooths his feathers on top of it.

     “Am I hot stuff or what.”

     “You look like you’re ready to meet the Dungeon Master,” you laugh. “You look like an elf.”

     “That’s Lil Diaval, Dark Meme King of the Moors to you,” he says. He clicks to save whatever he’s writing.

     “You’re sure to be protected from the rain with such a snazzy poncho.”

     “Yeah, you should ask your grams to make another one. Maybe you’ll stop using my wings as umbrellas.”

     “Pssh.” You rub your eyes with your knuckles and tug the sheets over your shoulders. Davesprite finishes another page in his document, and like a typewriter it spits him onto the top of the next, little black letters slowly taking form.

     “What are you writing?”

     “An open letter to the chess kid who keeps giving me the stink eye and takin’ the rest of the taco meat when he knows I’m about to get up for more. I’m printin’ and puttin’ it on the kitchen doors. Ninety-nine theses of basic goddamn dinner etiquette.”

     “That doesn’t look like proper letter format. Are you sure that carapacians can handle this much text when they’re so accustomed to woodblock prints and paparazzi photos?”

     “Your faith in the populace to empathize with my plight is depressing,” replies Davesprite. “Like I don’t have enough charisma to keep ‘em entertained by the personality exuding from this shit alone.”

     “Oh, really? Read a line.”

     “Can’t. Ain’t open to editing yet.”

     “You know what _I_ think?” You wrap the sheets tightly around you and shiver underneath them. “I think you’re lying.”

     Davesprite plants a hand on his chest and leans away from you.

     “Seriously, what are you writing?”

     Davesprite ignores you and keeps typing.

     “You know I can just go ahead and read the screen anyway if I want, right?”

     Davesprite stops and looks over his shoulder at you.

     “You _wouldn’t_.”

     “Wouldn’t I?”

     (You wouldn’t, but it works anyway.)

     He turns again and grumbles under his throat before he speaks, and when he does, he says it so quickly that it takes you a second to process it.

     “I’m writing a journal.”

     “You’re writing a what?”

     Davesprite’s feathers rise and fall like they’re doing the wave. “I’m writing, like, a vent journal. I guess. It’s kinda like the bastardization of this daily log I’d do way back when, back before I was constantly too dehydrated to sit at the desktop for more than two minutes. Except much less logging of Personal Progress and much more moaning and groaning.”

     One ear swivels back. “Why the sudden desire for a diary?”

     “Oh, nice call out. Yup, this is a grade-A diary all right. It’s got holographic butterflies on it, and the little key you need to unlock it is lost in the side pouch of my Vera Bradley backpack.”

     You roll your eyes almost to the back of your head. “Why are you writing a _journal_ , then?”

     “Mm. I dunno. Maybe I’m hoping the flash drive will keep floating out there in the void, and millions of years in the future, some snot-nosed alien kid will find it and our Wild Ride From Hell will be remembered somehow.”

     “Or they’ll throw it out because they won’t have compatible USB ports.”

     “Or that.”

     Davesprite rubs his thumb along the edge of the laptop, then sighs and closes the lid. He shifts himself so that he’s facing you, orange tail sweeping over the folds in the fabric.

     “Can we trade a question for a question.”

     “Um, sure.”

     “So I was talking to Nanna earlier, right.”

     “Yes?”

     Davesprite purses his lips to a thin line, eyes darting to some spot across the room. “Not that I’m saying she snitched about anything, like, I came up with this question entirely on my own, okay? Just thinkin’ about the boundless fuckin’ opportunities SBURB has lied out in front of us.”

     A nervous pebble rattles around inside you. “Okay.”

     Davesprite trails off, and you’re so prepared for him to drop the subject and turn around that you start to close your eyes again. But then he jumps to attention again, and the look on his face is as strange as before. You feel you’re about to be accused of something.

     “What do you know about the new session?”

     You throat tightens.

 

     “I don’t….” you start. Davesprite doesn’t blink, just gives you the same hard look, and you know that you can’t wriggle free of this conversation without moving permanently to an underground cave on LOFAF. “I thought that you, maybe you already knew, with sprite knowledge….”

     “Jade, I don’t know what makes you think I’ve got any kind of intel these days, but I know jack shit about where we’re hurdling,” he says.

     “I didn’t consider that,” you whisper. “I thought maybe you knew, but didn’t want to talk about it.” The lie burns, chemically sour, as it leaves your throat. You hope it’s too dark to notice your warming face.

     “You guessed wrong, then.”

     He just keeps looking at you. Your heart feels still from its beating.

     “Is something the matter to make you ask me this?” you ask.

     He shrugs. “Might be. I don’t know, is there.”

     The hot air rushing through the vents sputters out, and silence hangs heavy between you. You raise your hand gradually to your face, shielding your mouth behind your fingers.

     “We entered the game on meteors. All eight of us, at different points in time that Skaia selected,” you murmur. “And when we failed, when we requested a do-over in the form of the Scratch, Skaia chose a new team to pick up where the previous left off. It took our original meteors and hurled them through different portals, dispensing us in new locations.”

     Davesprite’s mouth twitches downward. “So, what, it tries to make us better fighters by dumping us in a different environment? Did we all get put into boot camp by overbearing Southern parents? Is there a new me in this universe who trained as like, a Russian spy or some shit?”

     “Not exactly.”

     “Then what the hell does that mean.”

     You flinch. “It means we lost our chance to play when we admitted defeat. It means that Skaia picked the next best team it had, sent them all into the same time frame so they could play in our places.”

     The battleship settles, and the ceiling above you groans.

     “It means that we’re not entering a new, blank-slate session to refill with our own lands, and it means that we aren’t meeting new versions of ourselves.”

     Slowly, Davesprite clamps his palm across the lower half of his face, finally tearing his eyes off of you to stare at the sheets.

     “The game we’re entering is not one we’re meant to play leading roles in,” you whisper after what feels like minutes. “We’re headed for a session where the players are our guardians.”

     He squeezes his eyes shut. Your gut simmers with shame, and you can’t bring yourself to look up and watch him as he leaps from the bed to pace around the room. Davesprite is making circles ‘round the perimeter, the end of his tail crackling and popping and flicking over your scattered possessions. He keeps his arms tight to his chest, one finger hiding his mouth – is he muttering to himself?

     “How long have you known this?” he gasps. The avian rasp of his voice makes it hard to understand what he’s saying. You dig your fingernails into your forearms.

     “A while.”

     “And you just assumed I knew?”

     Your stomach flips, and you have to take a couple of breaths just to make sure that words will come out instead of vomit. “I mean… at first. But then I found out pretty quickly that Nanna didn’t know, and I thought that maybe… you wouldn’t want to know. Because of….”

     Davesprite pauses in mid-drift, his hems shifting. His arms fly out, his open hands trembling in a way that makes him seem like he’s waiting to catch something. You can’t see his face.

     “Jade,” he says. “Did you not tell me about this so I would go along with your Shawshank-ass plan to leave the session?”

     It’s impossible not to hear how hard he’s trying not to raise his voice. You shrink into yourself, drawing your knees close to your chest.

     “Ignoring the fact that I don’t understand that reference… no. I wouldn’t deceive you like that.”

     He hangs his head, the long feathers of his wings flexing. “Then _why_.”

     “I didn’t want you to get your hopes up for a reunion that would just be taken away from us, even if we got far enough to meet them. I didn’t think it was fair to you.”

     Davesprite looks over at you, and you feel your figurative heartstrings bend and break. You can’t tell whether it’s the lighting or the crumpled look on his face that makes him appear so ready to cry.

     “He’s gonna be there, then.”

     “Yes.”

     He nods slowly. “He’s gonna be there… _shit_. Jade….”

     You wrap the sheets so tightly around your chest that you feel you’re about to vanish inside of them.

     “God, he’s gonna _be_ there. Jade, do you understand what this means?”

     You shake your head.

     “I can’t… there’s a chance, you know, that he’s not….” He runs his hand over his mouth. “You know, what if he’s not…?”

     “What if he’s…?”

     Davesprite runs his hand through his hair. “If there’s a chance I could actually _know_ my parents… even if Dave beats me to it, even if they brush me off ‘cause they’ve already met their real kid… I need to know what that could be like.”

     Your hair falls in front of your face, and you gaze at your fidgeting fingers.

     “I understand.”

     “Jade. I can’t leave the session. I can’t go to the Furthest Ring.”

     His tone is softer now, and you swallow hard to keep the tears down. For a few moments, your mind pushes his words out to keep from absorbing the full weight of them, to keep the panic of isolation from crushing you entirely. _You’re going to be alone out there_. You have to whisper lowly so he can’t hear it in your voice.

     “I know. I know.”

     Quietly, you hear Davesprite drift back to you. You don’t want him to see your face, so when he sits across from you on the curled-up coil of his sprite tail, he has to lift your chin up in his hands. He doesn’t look angry anymore – he just looks sad.

     “And if I’m not going, you can’t, either. We’re in this together.”

     The next time you blink, it makes the tears you’ve been holding back escape.

     “You don’t understand,” he continues. “The Furthest Ring is… it’s impossibly dark, and once you’re in, it feels like you can’t ever get out. There’s no space or time or any kind of direction – as soon as you step in, you may as well be lost forever. If I let you leave by yourself, we’d probably never see each other again.”

     You remove his hands from your face and force yourself to break eye contact.

     “I dream about it all the time. The looks on their faces. There’s never anything I can say to defend myself.” Davesprite releases his arms from under your hands and takes your fingers lightly between his. “I let this happen to all of us, and I have to live with that, but please don’t make me face them. Don’t make me tell them that this is my fault.”

     He squeezes your hands, leaning in so that the top of his forehead touches yours. “No, it isn’t. None of this is your fault. I don’t know how many times it’s gonna take for you to believe me, but not everything’s under your control, Jade. There’s shit that goes off the rails that we just can’t help, and it’s not your job to be responsible for everything. And to be honest, if any of them try to blame you for this, I will personally beat the shit out of them with my own two freakish bird hands.”

     The laugh that comes out of you is wet with tears, and you slip your head past him to rest it on his collarbone. Your shoulders tremble by minutia, and Davesprite lets go of your hands to wind them around your waist. His hands link together at the small of your back.

     “I knew this whole time,” you murmur. You slip your glasses off so your eyelashes don’t streak them with tears. “I knew it was cowardly to run. I guess I needed someone to snap me out of it.” You sniff, feeling a bit guilty for crying on his new outfit. “Thanks.”

     Davesprite adjusts his hands, pulling you forward. “While we’re at it, is there anything else I need to know?”

     You shake your head a little, and your hair brushes his jaw. “No.”

     “I wish you had told me,” he sighs. “Did you think I’d have a meltdown or something?”

     “Maybe a little.”

     “Well, I guess I sorta did. So, fair deduction. But maybe don’t make a habit of keeping mind-boggling SBURB secrets from me? I think I can handle them.”

     “Are you mad?”

     “Hm? What, no. A little stressed out, maybe. I guess I’ve got two years and x amount of months to figure out what I’m gonna say to my teen parents, though, so whatever.” He shrugs, jostling your position.

     You slip your hand between his collar and your face, wiping off your cheeks. “I’m sorry. There are no more game changers hidden up my sleeve, I promise.”

     “That’s a relief.”

 

     There are no more tears to give, and as you keep your face buried in his feathers, your cheeks start to itch with the ones that have dried. The boilers kick on under the floors, and the room is refilled with hollow noise. Davesprite lets go of your waist to lean away and look at you, but without your glasses it’s hard to read his face.

     “Well, we can’t show up and be dead weight. Do you wanna take another shot at training?”

     You wipe your lenses off, placing them back on your face to see everything with new, crisper edges. Davesprite has his face tilted to the side, and it’s such an incredible relief to see the absence of anger in his expression that you afford yourself a small smile.

     “That depends. Do you want to teach me how to sword fight yet?”


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> x2 update combob

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 December, 2009

 

     To the opposite of your surprise, your swordsmanship has become absolutely atrocious.

     Jade stands away from you in a LOFAF clearing, shifting her feet in the tall reeds. The sword she’s holding – the swords you’re both holding – were drawn by her, whipped up with slightly wobbly lines on her tablet before captchaloging the ghost images. Then, _poof_ , you had two fancy new swords. You know you could’ve used any of the mounds of swords sitting in your apartment, and you know Jade knows, but you’re grateful she didn’t ask.

     “Ready?” you ask.

     “Is my stance right?” she responds. Her voice carries over the field, but not enough to hide how unsure she sounds. You can’t really tell how she’s standing, what with the river weeds that poke up and hide her legs.

     “It’s good enough. Don’t worry about it.”

     Your sword is unwieldy in your hands, as though you’re trying to write an essay after summer vacation. The only reason you’re not embarrassed is because Jade has only started learning – if you’re sly, she won’t notice that you’re _re_ learning as well. You might even fool her into thinking you’re a halfway decent teacher.

     “Okay,” you snip. “This time I’m gonna try to knock it out of your hands. Basically, you’re trying to keep a proper hold on it so you don’t get unarmed or anything. Sound good?”

     Jade nods curtly, the hairs that escaped her bun bobbing. Her ears are perked up straight like those of a guard dog.

     “Let’s go, then.”

     The reeds hiss against Jade’s legs as she lunges at you, sword already poised to strike. You clench your teeth and dodge in time for her to overstep and sail past you. Surprise unfurls on her face. Stupid move – you didn’t meet her head on, so now she’ll know you were unprepared.

     Jade turns on her heel, and your wings make the reeds blow backward as you swivel to face her. This time you’re ready. Your blades clash against each other, a grating sound that makes your ears ring and your stomach turn. Jade pushes her sword back against yours. Excuse you, who’s trying to disarm who here? Your hilt bends against the weight of the other blade, and you have to stiffen your arms to hold your grip. Or, you know, keep your hands attached to your body. You don’t think they’d grow back as easily as your wings.

     It’s alarming, the confident glint in her eyes that was absent when you started. She was awkward at first, holding the sword more like a tennis racquet. It took a while to get her to forgive you after you started laughing – “ _I_ didn’t laugh at _you_ when you kept loading the magazine backwards!” – but now it feels like she’s taking the stairs past you two steps at a time.

     Shouldn’t have taken your eyes off her hands. Jade centers all her strength in her arms, and with a final shove, your sword flies out of your hands.

     For a fraction of a second, you’re terribly afraid. There’s the sharp smell of baking concrete, the impression that you’ve been nicked across the chest, and the muscles in your torso seize up. But then the feeling subsides, and you realize that Jade has paused with her blade just inches from your person. There’s not a drop of gold on you. She pulls it back and rests her palm on the bottom of the hilt. You exhale slowly.

     “Is it weird that it seems I’ve been doing this for a long time?” she asks.

     Your feathers are still fluffed up. “A little.”

     “Must be god tier stuff,” she sniffs. She spins the hilt once, making a ferris wheel of silver. “Or maybe you’re just a good teacher.”

     “The former seems more likely.”

     The crooked smile on her face relieves you, reminds you that this is supposed to be an informal lesson. No one’s going to toss you off a rooftop, least of all break your skin on purpose.

 

     Still expecting Skaia to rise and fall across the sky, LOFAF’s population of cicadas starts to croon by the river as your training goes on. The natural alarm clock tells you it must be around four in the afternoon, though it might as well be noon given the light. Their whining goes on and on, reaching a fever pitch before dropping into a dull drone. The noise is almost enough to tune out the scrape of metal against metal.

     Jade is fleet of foot now, one level away from being able to backflip out of your range every time you’re about to get the upper hand. You’re starting to wonder whether her grandpa taught her martial arts at two years old, and she’s just messing with you for the hell of it.

     Before you were prototyped, when you had legs and a strife specibus and the honor of being qualified as an Official Hero™, you could feel the presence of a stats bar, as corny as it sounds. Not that you knew the exact numbers it may have been displaying – hit points, mana, speed, whatever. You didn’t play enough video games to care; the only statistics you gave a shit about were “number of Dorito bags inside inventory” and “number of sick kickflips achieved.” What the bars did, really, was give you an impression of how badly you were fucking up. What you also clearly felt was the steady uptick of your “level,” making it easier to mow down the underlings without overexerting yourself. God knows what your level is now. You can still kind of feel it there, though it might be due to the disproportional amount of game coding buzzing in your head right now. Either way, Jade is seriously pushing your stats back, and the Whoopass-o-meter is in her favor.

     Right now, she’s pushing you back further into the field, and the shrieking of the cicadas in the trees is getting louder. You meet her slashes as quickly as you can, hyperfocusing on the movements of your swords. It takes a lot not to take small glimpses of her face – the more excited her expression, the more you know you’re totally screwed.

     It’s when you move closer to the riverbed that your sparring takes a turn. The soil is softer, bunches of reeds broken up by patches of earth that makes no difference to you – duh – but give more under Jade’s feet. You’re in the middle of deflecting a strike that could lop your head off if she was actually trying to hurt you. She tries to return the weight that you push against her, but one of her feet slides back in the mud and sends her toppling forward. On the way down, her sword almost slices the plates of your fingers off, and _your_ sword almost comes down to carve a diagonal line between her neck and shoulder. It’s hard to tell which one of you produces the highest-pitched sound.

     Objectively, Jade has been much more inconvenienced. She gives a look of distaste as she kneels in the weeds, wiping her hands off on her upper legs. She’s stuck her sword in the ground next to her. You, however, are still quaking with nerves, so much that you don’t even think to help her up. You’ve never been asthmatic, but if there was any time for a latent breathing issue to rear its head, it would be right now.

 

     You are twelve years old and the summer has reached its peak. The sun steams up your glasses and makes it hard to see. If your brother is having a similar issue, it’s hard to tell. Far below, a cluster of police cars is weaving its way through the traffic of your block, and their whining is what makes you grit your teeth and take your eyes off your brother’s sword. It’s a millisecond, if that, but it’s all he needs. His katana screeches against your own sword until it reaches the hilt and forces it out of your hands, and then you’re unarmed entirely. The end of his sword scrapes the top of your hand, and he’s already shaking his head as it flies to your mouth. You flinch when his gloved fist comes down to hit you over the head.

     “Got your head up your ass again,” he says. The sun hides behind the visor of his hat, lining black with white.

     “Like it ever leaves,” you mutter back.

     You pull your hand away from your lips and see that the top layer of skin has been sheared off. It’s all pink now, but the more you stare at it, the more pinpricks of red blood poke up and bead at the surface. Annoying, but you won’t need anything bigger than a normal Band-Aid. Bro lifts his sword again, spinning the hilt in his hand. You give him a look.

     “Seriously?” you groan.

     “Just keep your hand above your shoulders – it’ll stop the bleeding.”

     The final warbling of the police cars finally fades out, and it’s back to the huffing and puffing of the buses trundling down the street.

     “I can’t _do_ that without looking like a fuckin’ Viking. Am I pillagin’ the mainland now?”

     “It’s not that hard,” he says. His tone is tight and impatient, and you know the conversation is over.

     And then you’re back at it, shitty katanas scraping and the sun glinting off the skyscrapers.

 

     “Are you okay?” you gasp. Your hand is pressed to your chest, bunching up the fabric of your shirt in your fingers. The smell of hot asphalt fills your nose, and you feel suddenly dizzy.

     “Yeah, yeah….” Jade responds. She pushes herself upright and flicks the mud off of her legs with a swipe of her hands. After the green fades, you can’t even tell that she fell. “Sorry, I think I almost made you left-handed.”

     It occurs to you that she’s almost laughing. She thinks this is _funny_. Somehow, this doesn’t ease the imminent cardiac arrest you’re still feeling.

     “Better than being half-torsoed. Are you sure you’re okay?”

     Jade stretches her arms behind her head and then grabs the sword from the soil, cleaning it off in the grass.  “Yes, I’m fine. See? Not a mark on me.” She angles herself side to side and does a jazz hand with the one that’s not holding a weapon.

     “Ah. Okay, cool.” You knead your chest. “Hey, Jade?”

     Her guard dog ears have calmed down, flicking to repel a stray cicada that buzzes between you. “What?”

     “Do you think we could not, like, practice on each other? If I give you so much as a papercut it’s gonna be on my conscience forever.”

     “I think the likelihood of that is pretty low,” she says. To punctuate her point, she makes her sword crackle with green and yellow lightning, but all it does is make you nervous for a different reason. You lower your shoulders and give her a look. Something like understanding sparks on her face.

     “All right,” she says. “What are we gonna fight, then? Flowers?”

     You bite the inside of your mouth and shrug. “I was thinking more along the lines of underlings.”

           

 

     Deep inside LOFAF’s blue-green forests, a teeming horde of underlings has continued to rumble through the trees. That is, except the basest of the crew – small and suggestible and made complacent by months of having no one to attack, the imps have become harmless. The deeper you travel into the woods, the more elusive Uranium imps you see in the branches, their blank eyes shining. Upon spotting you, one of them flaps their dark green wings, parrot-like, and flies up into the canopy. What the two of you are looking for are the big game critters, the basilisks and the Acheron and the Giclopses. You can hear them out there, their massive feet crunching the underbrush, their spiked heads whispering against the branches.

     In the past hour, the pickings have proved limited. Jade has felled two Plutonium Acheron and a pair of Thorium Basilisks. At her insistence that you learn something new today as well, you’ve shot at a flock of cat-faced things that gurgled out of the river to sling their tentacles at you. The grist they dropped almost floated down the water, and Jade laughed at you as you flapped your wings to catch the reward.

     Jade curls and uncurls her fingers around her sword’s hilt. You lug the metallic weight of the Girl’s Best Friend behind her. Slung over your back, the gun nestles between your wings and bobs annoyingly against your torso.

     You don’t know why you don’t just teleport to the biggest and nearest underling, but if Jade wants to tire herself out by hiking, that’s her business. It looks like she’s found what she’s looking for, though. Her ears stand to attention, and she raises her hand to make you pause.

     “Something’s at two o’clock. Looks like a giant spider.” Her ear swivels to the back and twitches forward again. “Scratch that. There’s a few of them.”

     “Titachnids.” You shudder. “I hate those fuckers. They would make these giant webs in the metal scrapes, and Calsprite was dumb enough to get caught in more than one. Too bad he always escaped before they ate him.”

     “I’d say it’s a Malachite variety,” Jade says. She tosses her sword in the air and catches the hilt. “Let’s make sure we don’t fight them in the water.”

     She jogs to keep close to their trail, bushes of berries swishing past her bare legs. You can start to see their silhouettes now. They’re massive things, their thick legs making them cumbersome as they plod through the trees. There are three of them. One of the Titachnids steps on a half-felled branch, and it splinters underfoot. A different one has the same tentacles that Jaspers sports, twitching and writhing out of its cephalothorax. Your stomach complains.

     Using the flat boulders as a springboard, Jade leaps over the creek rippling through the trees and lands on both feet, prompting the smallest of the Titachnids to turn its attention. Its entire body turns to plant its eyes on her. Like the rest, it has four fangs like tusks that click as it rattles a warning to its friends. After living in the forest for so long, the harlequin garb that prototyping bequeathed it has been ripped to shreds.

     “Hello!” Jade chirps. It would be adorable if she wasn’t sporting a deadly weapon. The Titachnid makes a sound like Velcro, and the bigger ones who are further ahead turn to investigate. You scramble to yank the rifle off your back.

     Jade goes for the weakest link, lunging at the smallest spider and slicing its middle legs off at the joints. The thing gives a terrible, shrieking whine as it teeters on its four remaining limbs. The front legs are the first to buckle, and then the Titachnid is on its side. Light shines through the canopy and freckles the scene with brighter splotches, and as Jade hops on top of the underling, you can see that its body is marbled with dark greens and teals. She plunges the sword into it, and streams of turquoise spill out. The sound it makes is wet, exoskeleton and muscle yielding to metal, and in the next second Jade yelps as the body disappears under her feet. She lands on a comically sized chunk of grist. A sound resembling the _cha-ching_ of a cash register marks the new addition to your resources.

     The two remaining underlings screech in protest. One of them is closer than the other. You’re across the creek now, and you aim your rifle between its eyes, looking through the trembling crosshairs. Hoping that your arms are at a proper angle, you pull the trigger and feel the rifle’s butt thud against your shoulder. This Titachnid, one sporting the ears of Jade’s dog, shakes its head and clicks its fangs. At first you think you’ve made a direct hit, but all it’s done is made its body a portal to avoid your bullet. It’s still crackling green.

     “Damn,” you mutter. You try again, but the Titachnid is already onto your plan. Its silhouette goes chartreuse as it prepares to teleport to safety.

     “Oh, no you don’t!” Jade snaps. She reaches her arm out and curls her fingers inward, yanking the underling back to the trees. Then she lifts her sword with the same outline of green, launching it like a spear through the spider’s front. It careens out of control, thudding against the trunk of a massive tree.

     “That’s cheating!” you complain.

     “Take care of the other one,” she shoots back.

     You grumble and turn to the last one standing, who raises its hairy front legs to charge to the aid of the other. The rifle rattles in your arms as you aim it at its front legs, shooting it through the joints. Nice, you didn’t fuck this one up! The Titachnid staggers and regains its footing, blood spilling onto the earth. Its tentacles writhe outward to balance itself, giving it the eerie appearance of having regenerated its limbs. You aim for those next; it takes three shots to remove the first tentacle, and it falls to the ground with a dull thud. Bright blue seeps from the wound in its side, and you can see that its tissue is similarly marbled.

     Jade has her foot in the crook between the spider’s head and body, wrenching her sword down the center of its face. The two sides of its head split apart and slide away like paper, layers of muscle and teeth meeting the air and already smelling fetid. The rest of the body crumples, legs folding in on themselves, and again Jade leaps onto a sizable pile of grist.

     You, however, are having a time of it. The third and final Titachnid spits and gurgles, charging toward you on its last legs. You duck down, flattening yourself towards the ground, and when the underling is on top of you, you aim your rifle up and shoot through its stomach. You have to keep from gagging when spots of blood land on you.

     “Good shot!” you hear Jade call. Encouraged, you flap your wings out and sail up to the Titachnid’s face. It opens its mouth, showing you its rows of small, flat teeth. You cock the gun, and without bothering to look through the scope, you shoot it through the back of the throat.

     You coast down and swipe your tail over the grist to make it disappear.

     “One out of three isn’t bad,” you mutter. “Takin’ pest extermination to the next level.”

     “Yup!” Jade agrees. “I guess it’s better practice to use a bigger target.”

     “ _Wow_.”

     Jade steps over a halved branch and stops in front of you. She brushes her thumb across the blue specks of underling blood on your face, flicking them off into the dirt.

     “Either way, I’m seeing improvement,” she says.

     You lean forward like you’re going to peck the side of her mouth, and she moves to reciprocate, but you dodge your head out of the way and kiss the air next to her head.

     “Dave!”

     “Whoops, not a big enough target.”

     She shoves you softly in the shoulder. You take her hand in yours before she can draw it away – what is it about slaughtering giant bugs that makes you feel so affectionate? – and you start to retrace your steps back out of the forest. Jade gives a satisfied exhale, looking tired. The muscles in her face relax.

     You’re interrupted by a great snapping of tree branches. You look up to see the light pouring through the top of the forest, cleared away by the lumbering steps of an Emerald Giclops. It rises out of its resting place, a sedentary creature woken by the dying screams of the Titachnids.

     “Oh. Well, shit,” you say.

     “No kidding.” Jade nudges you in the arm. “Hey, are you tired of shooting?”

     “You know I am.”

     “Then let’s get rid of this thing the easy way.”

     You glance at her, but she’s gazing up at the tower of green blocking out the light. “How many HP you got?”

     “Just because you dress like a wizard doesn’t mean you can keep sounding like a D&D nerd.”

     “Okay, I’ll interpret that answer as ‘enough.’ I probably got a little less, but I think we’re good.”

     Jade readies her nigh-useless strife specibus, made obsolete by the freakish capacity for fighting that the god tier has clearly given her, and you access the files in your code. Open > Applications > Battle & Strife > Special > Fraymotifs.

     “Ready when you are,” she says.

     “Got it.”

     Right as the Emerald Giclops is about to raise its massive hand to crush you, Acciaccato Capriccio blasts it into uneven shards. The fraymotif slows the bubble of time it occupies, making its hand pause at the peak of its arch. Its pupil dilates in slow motion as it realizes what you’ve done. Then the space ripples through it, tears asunder each individual cell, and inside its dome of squashed time, the Giclops breaks apart to nothing.

     The grist rains down on you both, and you clap a pentagonal chunk of yellow-green between your hands. You hear Jade laughing beside you.

 

 

     Taking pity on you, Jade teleports you directly into the atrium rather than making you hike through the muggy trees. You collapse under one of the windows, wings flexed to full length to soak up the air conditioning. The sweat sticks to your neck.

     Across the greenhouse, Jade is swaying at a long table of oranges. One of her records plays over the speakers, the movement of her shoulders in tune with the soft plucks of a violin. The pots of flowers around her have exploded with color over the last few months. Your vision goes out of focus, and all you see are the speckles of green and yellow and blue and red that span across the room. Jade finishes snipping fruits into a basket, plopping down on the floor next to you. You grunt in recognition, and she offers you an orange.

     “They’re a little small,” she sighs. “But it’s Mandarin season, so they’ll be all right.” She picks at the peel with her thumbnail.

     You take an orange from her and twist it in your hands. The skin is speckled with pores, rubbery and soft. It rips open immediately when you give it a tentative poke with your talon. The sharp smell makes your nostrils flare.

     Jade is already eating her second slice when you present her with the gnarled peel in a request for help. She snorts at you and takes it away, splitting it apart to reveal the fruit inside.

     “You act like you’ve never eaten fruit before,” she says between chews.

     “You’re not far off.”

     “Oranges were always my favorite,” Jade continues. The even spiral of her peel rests on her leg. “If anything’s worth picking away at a peel for, that’d be it. You’ll learn soon enough.”

     “Oranges are your _favorite_ , you say?” You fluff your wing out to jostle her. “Are you implying that you only like me for my vivacious hues?”

     “What are you gonna do about it?” she laughs. She bops your shoulder with her own, too sore to do much else.

     “I’ve never been so insulted in my life.”

 

     Jade rests her head on your arm, and you lean back further against the wall. Her muscles feel entirely unraveled.

     “When I was younger, I dislocated my shoulder,” she murmurs. “It was with a rifle. My bones got used to it after a while, but that’s the most pain it ever caused me.”

     “Before and after,” you yawn. Your eyes start to close. “Good to know I’ll just have to wait years and years for that thing to stop fucking me up.”

     Jade laughs weakly, a breathy giggle that doesn’t even make her shoulders rise. “It was almost impossible to lift things. Bec wouldn’t let me shoot for weeks.”

     You bury your cheek in her hair. “How can a dog make you _do_ anything. He can’t talk. He can’t ground you.”

     “See, that’s where you’d be wrong. His nonverbal commands become pretty hard to disobey when he has the ability to zap anything away from you. I wanted to pick up a gun? Poof, right out of my hands and into the cupboard. And if I was actually _grounded_? Say hello to having the bottom of the stairwell guarded. I could talk one step down and he’d hurl me back into bed.”

     “Sounds like a strict parent.”

     “Yeah. It was pretty easy to understand him when his powers made it impossible not to tell what he did and didn’t want me to do. The whole lack of speech thing made it hard to learn anything social from him, though. It wasn’t the same as talking to people. I had to go to the Internet for that.”

     “You’re such a feral child.”

     “Am not. Bec was very intelligent. A little overbearing, but he wanted what was best for me. Even if we couldn’t talk, we understood each other. Not everything needs to be said aloud.”

     “Damn, your dog is kicking ass in the parent department. If you told me he drove you to soccer practice and went to PTA meetings, I’d probably believe you. Bringin’ sugar-coated Snausages for the moms in your Girl Scout branch. Helen is pissed because they love it more than her shortbread. He’s got a little tie with bones printed on it.”

     You feel the quiet nasal exhale Jade gives, a sign that she’ll be falling asleep any moment now. “Basically, yeah. He was the definition of a helicopter parent. It was annoying at the time, but in retrospect, it saved my life. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have _something_ looking after me, even if it was a dog.”

     “And now you got all of us,” you murmur.

     “Yeah, now I’ve got all of you.”

     You roll your shoulders back, and their muscles moan in resistance. The air hisses between your teeth, and Jade lifts her head to see you wincing.

     “You should really stop doing things once you know it’s uncomfortable,” she says. “Shooting can wait.” She reaches up to rub your bruised shoulders, both aching with the blessing-curse of ambidexterity.

     You slump against her and close your eyes. Down below, the cicadas are still singing.


	35. Chapter 35

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 31 December, 2009

 

     It should be midnight in sixteen minutes. Or fifteen, or fourteen, or seventeen. You have a timer set up on your screen, counting down with blocky, yellow numbers. The hazy reflection of them through the glass you’re holding widens as it shifts from 16:31 to 16:30.

     At the very top of Rose’s house, you almost think you can see The Land of Light and Rain’s curvature. Smatters of chalk and marble islands dot the ocean, and on one of them is a wooden crate of your grandfather’s old explosives. Stamped with a seal and coated in dust, you pulled it from the bunker deep underneath your tower. Davesprite was worried they’d blow just by touching it, so you’ve teleported it a safe distance away. There’s a chance that the lightshow they’ll produce will be terribly underwhelming – or nonexistent – but you were so excited by the idea of setting off fireworks that you were willing to try.

           

     The cake from Christmas is a little crusty, but the two of you chisel at it anyway. Nanna broke from tradition to make this one a _little_ seasonal – you’ve already eaten the corner pieces that were lined with red and green, but sprinkles of the same color still peep out from the inside. Not a trace of blue.

     Overall, the holidays have been… under the radar. You obliged Nanna by uprooting the plumpest tree on LOFAF you could find, and she took care of the rest, placing it in a nice pot and using her sprite magic to festoon it with snowflakes and tinsel in crystalline whites and blues. Noticing there was no star for the top, Nanna launched into a ten-minute epic about the heirloom angel her family used back in the day, and you could only satisfy her once you bottled up a hunk of flickering uranium from your house and stuck it at the top to glow like the Green Sun.

     You should be grateful. Nanna’s standards for the amount of spirit she could wring out of you was considerably low. As long as you allowed her to comb your hair out and arrange the three of you, Jaspers, Casey, and whichever carapacians cared to sit in front of the tree for a picture, she was content. Well, that _and_ putting you to work decorating cookies. You had to give your puppies Santa hats to pass the holiday threshold. Davesprite kept giving his snowmen pork chop mouths and carrot noses that were too long to fit in the frame, but Nanna was too distracted by his stories of never seeing snow to notice.

     Mostly, it seemed like she wanted company. It didn’t matter that neither of you knew what to do with wrapping paper, or that you didn’t recognize any of the Christmas carols she chose to play over the course of the evening. There was a quiet desperation to her efforts. Luckily, this time you were prepared. The night before, Davesprite helped you arrange a basket of the first fruits and veggies that could plausibly be used for cooking, and you topped it off by finding two of the most old-school holiday albums in your grandfather’s crate. Even though they were grimy and peeling at the spines, she crooned over them for ages, muttering about how long it’d been since she’d heard _this_ song by _this_ artist. It was nice to see the look on her face, and a smile stayed plastered to your mouth until the muscles ached.

     And despite her disdain for meals that are more than fifty percent herbivorous, you keep catching her making herself salads.

 

     “Six-teen minutes,” Davesprite sighs. He taps his fork against the edge of the platter. “ _It’s the fi-nal count-down_.”

     You reach over his hand to stab a sizable crumb with your fork. “Should we be playing dramatic countdown music?”

     He tilts his head side to side. “Depends. I’ve only ever watched the Times Square feed once or twice. Right about now we should be hearing muffled Ke$ha tracks in the background while Ryan Seacrest makes a joke about Lady Gaga’s whacky earlier performance. Cue the thirty-second montage of tourists wearing douchey 2010 glasses with the 1s on their noses or some shit.” Davesprite bites his fork to get the leftover icing off of it. “Then on one of the big-ass digital screens there’d be this egregiously sized poster for whatever Adam Sandler holiday-themed movie is out. Cue another thirty-second montage of tourists yodeling into the camera and shaking their ropes of plastic necklaces like they think it’s gonna summon Boogicoatl the Disco Goddess at the stroke of midnight.” He pauses. “Holy shit, I think I just made a breakthrough of evolutionary psychology. New Year’s Eve is a blood sacrifice in which the wrinkly old corpse of the previous year is brutally slaughtered to make way for the new one, a respectable modern day adaption of the ceremonial killings of old – confirmed.”

     “You’re turning this into a very morbid affair.”

     “It’s what I live for.”

     You pick a red sprinkle from the creases of your dress and flick it at him.

     “That’s real nice. ‘Miss Harley, who are you wearing tonight?’ ‘I don’t know, I was too busy throwing food at innocents during the transaction.’”

     “You’re just mad because _you_ didn’t dress up. And envy doesn’t look good on anyone.”

     You had the impression that this holiday warranted classy evening wear. This is probably because of a photo folder in your grandfather’s office of his New Years in Thailand with all his fancy-pants philanthropist friends. Granted, Songkran didn’t happen until April, but wouldn’t it make sense for all New Years to be fancy? So you went into your Alchemiter’s backlogs and got it to spit out another Three in the Morning Dress – free of singed hems and shaving cream stains! It squeezed at your ribcage and came to an abrupt halt at your ankles, but that was nothing a little bit of First Guardian tailoring couldn’t fix. It doesn’t make you feel bad that you’re overdressed for a casual night of exploding illegal fireworks and eating cake, though – it kinda boosts your mood to look so nice.

     “That’s ‘cause you never sent me the dress code, man. You’ve got me lookin’ like fuckin’ Punky Brewster over here. You want me to look snazzy, you shoulda sent me some card stock with gold foil instructions in Vivaldi font. RSVP to the middle of the goddamned ocean.”

     Your giggly snort echoes inside the glass you’re holding. Everything has been getting amazingly funny as the hours progress. The foil that you chipped off of Ms. Lalonde’s champagne bottle curls around your laptop and resembles the garbage left by chocolate coins.

     “My jokes are killin’ it tonight. I oughta be depressed that it takes upper class grape juice to elevate me to the echelons of hilarity. Am I not _funny_ enough for you,” Davesprite says, prodding you in the shoulder.

     "I always think you’re funny,” you say. You take half a drink and start laughing into your drink. “Funny _looking_.”

     “Oh shit. Ohhh _shit_. That cracks it. The secrets of comedic genius are hidden away in this vessel, and I’ll be damned if I let you monopolize it.”

     Davesprite takes your glass from you and sniffs at it, his nose scrunching up. You think he’s just joking, that he’ll shy away and shove it back to you, but instead he takes a tentative sip out of it. It makes you nervous to watch. He lowers the glass and twists his face up, and in the next second he bursts into a fit of sneezing. You fall backwards with laughter.

     “Fucking–” he sneezes, “–bubbles!” His wings spasm with each sneeze, the feathers fluffing out twice their normal size. You clutch your aching sides – if you were howling any louder, it’d turn into a literal wolf’s howl.

     “Oh my _god_ ,” you gasp. “If I knew that was going to happen, I would have caught it on video.”

     Davesprite sniffs and licks his lips, setting the glass down like he thinks it’ll explode.

     “If I’m going to go viral for anything in my life, it’s gonna be for being the Incipisphere’s most dashingly handsome bird dude.”

     For emphasis, he straightens out the front of his nerdy time poncho. Something falls out of the inside pocket and clinks to the ground, and when he picks it up, you see it has a silver chain that hangs between his fingers. You pull yourself upright and sweep your hair over your shoulder.

     “You still have two years to be a viral superstar in the Furthest Ring,” you say. “You just need a way to get your blog broadcasted out there.”

     “Sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.” He runs his other hand under his nose. “I know this is corny of me, like, straight up certified grown in the Midwest corny, plucked straight from the heartland kinda corny, but it’s kind of a relief for this year to be over.”

     You cock your head. “How come?”

     “I just feel like it’s an important step? Like we’re closer to finding out what’s gonna be on the other side of that fuckin’ window.” He thumbs the thing in his hand like a worry stone. “Even if time isn’t real and all our problems are gonna follow us into midnight. It feels like… I dunno, molting.”

     “Again with the bird stuff!”

     “What do you expect.”

     The countdown ticks down to ten minutes. Davesprite jabs a talon at the screen to turn your attention to it. He throws the thing in his hand up in the air and catches it with the chain ‘round his finger, swinging it around like a yo-yo. You train your eyes on the bright green epicycloid carved into its surface, blurred by motion, and you realize that it’s the same token Nanna always wears. It’s his sprite pendant.

     “Where’d that come from?” you ask. “Did it disappear under all my stuff? If so, sorry.”

     “Hm?” Davesprite stops spinning it, and the pendant thuds against his forearm. It sways a little, and the light of your laptop screen glints off its edges. “No, I ditched this thing week fuckin’ one. It’s been sitting in my old room for months.”

     “Wow, no one stole it?”

     “That surprised me, too.” Davesprite jounces the pendant up to land in the center of his palm. “Door was practically stuck with rust. Had to force it open. And there it was, sittin’ on the windowsill.”

     “When did you go get it?” you ask. “Or, um… why?”

     “Uh, it was actually a while ago. Maybe a month? I got lost coming down from the weird loft thing your grandma lives in, and I thought, hey, why not try and find the cave I was living in before.” He scratches the back of his ear. “She always wears that thing, y’know? I guess I understand why. It made me feel kinda conspicuous for not having mine. Like Cedric and Bob are gonna burst into the room askin’ who doesn’t wanna wear the pendant.”

     “Yeah, but you’re still not wearing it.”

     “No, I’m not.” Davesprite swipes his thumb over the surface again. “I think my brand of sentimentality would be super fucked up compared to Nanna’s.” He opens his hand wider to show you the pendant. “See that stuff in the etching?”

     You squint. It’s dark and hard, and whatever it is, there’s not enough light to discern.

     “I left it behind when Jack killed my bro. I don’t really remember why. I think I just freaked out and tugged it off just to have something to throw. It like… thunked against him. Like, this hollow, wet sound. Then it started to kinda… pool in the indents.”

     Your stomach turns. You close your eyes and look away from the blood.

     “Then I felt bad about it. No way in hell I was gonna pull that sword out, so like, what else was I gonna do? Tote along my amputated wing as a relic or something? So I took it back.” He looks over the edge of the rooftop, a nerve in his jaw twitching. “I don’t remember much of it, actually. It hardly seems real. If it wasn’t in my hand, I’d wonder if I really went back there at all.” He sighs. “The ends of the chain were broken from ripping it off. I had to knot them together. Kinda hard when you have velociraptor hands.”

     Your ears relax and swivel back. “Is that the only reason you went back for it?”

     He chews the inside of his mouth. “Pretty impossible to pin down reasons for doing impulsive shit in the immediate aftermath of watching your guardian die. I’m sure it wasn’t.”

     There are spots in the design where you can tell dark splotches of blood once were, but have since been rubbed away by wear. You wonder if any blood cells are coming off on his hands right now.

     “I hate this thing. It was always a punch in the gut. Like your player is your owner, yankin’ the leash and pullin’ you out of whatever awesome meadow you were scampering around in.”

     “I understood _that_ metaphor.”

     “Yeah. And it’s just so you can do asinine bullshit for them and dispense genie wisdom for their stupid-ass quest. ‘Thanks for disturbing my existential crisis, dude. Oh, you wanna know how to take the golden staff to the village? Let me whip up a ten-stanza riddle for you.’ It’s just a reminder that you exist to serve.”

     You scooch yourself closer to him, then rest your cheek on his shoulder. The tension in his torso unwinds a little, and he drops his hand to his lap.

     “Well, you don’t anymore.”

     He sighs and leans his face against the top of your head. “Yeah. I don’t.”

     Your eyes start to close, the champagne pooling in the crevices of your arms and your head to drag you into a comfortable sleepiness. Davesprite’s wing stretches out to drape over your shoulder, and you can hear him fiddling with the pendant in his hands. His claws click against the silver.

 

     When the online countdown gives a high-pitched chirp to announce the ten second mark, you yelp and jolt to attention. Davesprite sucks in a sharp breath and spreads his wings out. Where did that island go? You pinpoint the far-off rock, the crate of explosives that rest in splintered wood and straws of hay. God, you probably should have looked up instructions for lighting them.

     “Hurry, it’ll won’t be the vague approximation of 2009 forever,” Davesprite yawns.

     “I’m trying, I’m trying.”

     Fuck it. When in doubt, just light it all on fire.

     You raise your palms and toss the fireworks into the sky, accelerating the atoms in their fuses to set them aflame. The fear of anticlimax makes your heart tighten – their age or even the humid ocean air could spoil any chance of reaction once the fuse is blackened. You clasp your hands tightly around Davesprite’s free hand, paling your knuckles.

     “Five,” he murmurs.

     “Four.”

     Three, two, one.

     At the same time your computer starts squalling to announce the end of the countdown, your grandfather’s century-old fireworks explode into the sky. The first is bright yellow, a kernel that whizzes over the sea and bursts into a mushroom cloud of tiny sparks. Your airway feels strained with the air that leaves you. There’s a blue one, a red one, a bright pink and a neon green. Each leaves echoes of their whines and pops, leftover embers falling into the ocean and melting away. The reflection of LOLAR’s sea multiplies its color spectrum.

     There’s only one other New Year’s tradition you’re certain of. Davesprite is already looking at you when you turn to face him, but the champagne bubbles in your fingers and makes you feel like you’re shifting in and out of your body’s outline. You only get the corner of his mouth, then burst into fresh laughter when he gives you a surprised look. His hand slips through your hair and rests at the back of your neck, steadying your head to kiss you properly. At first there’s nothing particularly special about it, but then he leans further in, talon tips digging into your curls, and what you begin to realize, _really_ realize, is that you are the last of a critically endangered species, and any effort you’ve put into keeping track of the calendar is a desperate and arbitrary venture.

     But it’s hard to stay existential about it when someone is kissing you and there’s a rainbow of explosives going off.

     “You’re just gonna have to pretend that we’re wearing ugly sunglasses and Ryan Seacrest is sticking a microphone in our faces,” he says after you break apart. Then he thinks better of pulling away, putting his arm around your neck to kiss you two more times in quick succession. The roughness of the skin on his forearm shudders against your bare upper back, and you wonder fleetingly if he thinks this is a better method of taste testing your drink.

     The last of the fireworks are starting to unfurl. Davesprite lets go of you, one of his wings bridging the distance. You tug the long feathers over your arm to warm you up in the high altitude, curling your legs into the satin of your dress. The next firework whispers into the sky and roars to life, a shower of chartreuse that fully reflects on the ocean and doubles its size.

     It happens so quickly that you almost don’t notice. Davesprite bounces the pendant once more in his hand, winds his arm back, and flings it off the edge of the roof. The silver surface reflects a pop of brightest green, sailing across the shore in slow motion, and in seconds it disappears into the dark.

 


	36. Chapter 36

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 14 February, 2010

 

     Jade has her back turned to you in a statement of defiance, slapping down crisp cards onto the nightstand. She’s wheeled it around to the footboard as a makeshift desk, and right now, it’s her headquarters in shooting down your insistent requests to celebrate an ancient relic of Western civilization known as Valentine’s Day.

     “You’re not even givin’ me a legit reason,” you complain. “Like, why _not_.”

     She mouths something, looking into a little leather-bound book nicked from Rose’s room. A thin ribbon snakes out of the page of diagrams she’s perusing. Jade reaches for a card at the top of the stack very slowly, then stares at it before setting it down on the nightstand.

     “As you would say, it’s ‘corny as hell,’” she replies.

     You’ve been swooping around the room for a while now, hoping that it would be enough to get her up and moving out the door. It hasn’t been much use. You groan and bonk your forehead against the bedpost.

     “Would you put those fuckin’ cards down. What even is there to divinate about our futures right now. Like, ‘oh, today you’re gonna lay in bed for three hours instead of five.’”

     “That is not how tarot works… I don’t think.” Jade taps her fingernails against the two closest cards to her. Her ears strain in concentration. “And it’s just something to do.”

     “Something to _do_ would be _you_ letting _me_ take you _out_. It literally isn’t any different from practically any other date we’ve been on.”

      “Dave….” Jade closes her mouth and sighs slowly through her nose. “I was content to celebrate Christmas if it made Nanna happy. We at least owed her _that_. I do not see why we have to honor every special date on the calendar. They’re not relevant anymore.”

     “You did New Year’s.”

     “Well, we couldn’t ignore the year _ending_.”

     "But time out here isn’t real, right.”

     Jade shoots you a look over her shoulder. “You don’t want me to tell you how subjective that statement is.”

     “You’re right, I don’t have the attention span. People do irrelevant things all the time, though, Jade. Shit that serves no other purpose than to waste time. Like eating dinner at McDonald’s even though you know damn well you’re gonna be hungry again in half an hour.”

     Jade flips her page in the most delicate way possible, and you hear how thin the paper is from the tiny whisper it produces.

     “It’s tacky.”

     “Okay, if anyone should be complaining about that it’s me. You’ve never had to walk through a grocery store in January and February and see the fuckin’ design disaster that is red and pink mashed together.”

     Jade doesn’t say anything.

     You’re waiting for her to spit out the real reason she’s being contrary. Simply put, she just doesn’t know what to do when given special attention. If Nanna had taught the carapacians how to sing the birthday song, she might have melted into the floorboards in mortification. Which is understandable – like, same. Maybe living on a deserted island renders a spotlight of positivity more disagreeable. But if you could accurately translate your shame over forgetting her birthday into physical force (seriously, December pounced on you like a wild raccoon out of a heap of trash cans), your palm could break through your forehead and crush your skull. You’d like to make up for that. You’d also like to know how it feels to give someone a gift in person.

     Finished with her card spread, Jade rests her face in her hand and fiddles with the plastic foil they came in. So that means Rose never bothered to learn it herself – she probably bought the deck off a whim from a Barnes & Noble and immediately shelved it, telling herself she’d take a crack at it over the next school vacation.

     “Okay, other than it being an outdated, irrelevant, and tacky artifact of our former civilization, what do you have against doing it.”

     “It just seems awfully unnecessary.”

     You pinch the bridge of your nose. “Jade, I would like to maintain at least a flimsy imitation of normalcy here. Can you just let me do this.”

     The resigned relaxing of her ears hints that you may have made a breakthrough. Jade draws one more card from the deck, holding it daintily between her index and middle fingers. It reflects a streak of light across its lamination. Then she looks over at you, face blank, and points the card at you like it’s evidence of a crime.

     “All right, Hierophant, I’ll conform to your dumb Western civilization if it’ll make you happy.”

     “Sick. Okay, I take back what I said about all that stuff.”

     She gives a dramatic gasp and clasps the card to her heart. “What, you mean all these fucking cards?”

     “Yeah, all those fuckin’ cards.” You flap your wings to hurry her as she shoves herself out of bed and cracks her joints. “Let’s get goin’, can’t be wastin’ daylight.”

     “Very funny.”

 

 

     You didn’t think you’d get this far.

     There were several options on the plate. You could be a total dork and go down the safe route with flowers – except that wouldn’t be a safe route at all, because you’d have to gank them from her garden, and she wouldn’t appreciate that. You might try to be original and write a rap, but you think she’d immediately revoke accepting the invitation and fuck off. What you finally went with is a pretty nice blend of dweeby and creative.

     During the few weeks leading up to today, you’ve taken to stealthily recording the random chords Jade sometimes plays on her bass. You built up a decent library of samples, then remixed them all into a single track. The beginning is your favorite part – you dig when songs have the sounds of people talking or objects moving, so you made your track start off with Jade’s bass rustling across the sheets and into her lap, her little hums as she tuned the instrument and tested how the strings sounded. But if you were gonna persuade her to go anywhere, you knew you’d need something else to ensure she wouldn’t be counting the seconds. So the last time you were at the Lalonde’s, you raided your mom’s store of Godiva, a.k.a. the most reasonable food to hoard when you’re a spinster whose kitchen is stuffed with booze. Nanna helped you alchemize the same thing, except not _expired_. Thank god for grandmas. The final product, in your honest opinion, is awfully cute. Pat on the back to you for doing something genuinely sentimental.

     The carpet of this Prospitian palace is starting to unravel in patches. Muddy footprints have dried into the fibers from where a group of carapacians barreled down the hallway. Jade steps to avoid the smatters of their frantic retreat, her feet quiet on the shiny, checkered floor.

     “I don’t know how you managed to hide this from me,” Jade says. She keeps her arms folded tight to her chest, but a smile is still stuck on her face. “Usually I’m very aware of when recording devices are being used in my vicinity.”

     “It’s probably ‘cause you think I’m not capable of being sneaky. Today that theory just got Mythbusted.”

     Jade starts to walk too far away from you, and the earbuds you’re sharing almost fall out. She yelps and hops back to the safety of the rug, twisting the earbud back in. Your arms bump together.

     “Well, I have to hand it to you. I never thought any of those sessions sounded very good – I was just trying to relearn songs I used to know. You actually made it sound tolerable.”

     You shrug your shoulders. “Meh. It was tolerable to begin with. It’ll sound better later, I’m takin’ away half the experience by horning in on the headphones.”

     The tension in her muscles has unwound, like any suspicion she felt over a potentially unpleasant surprise has dissipated. Success! If you can keep this up, maybe she won’t mash the chocolate into your face and teleport away to seethe with embarrassment on a remote island.

     “Oh, one more thing.” You try to broach it like you actually forgot. “Hope you didn’t think I brought you up here to reveal evidence of long-standing creepsterism. I got somethin’ else up my metaphorical sleeve.”

     The worry returns to her face, and her cheeks stain darker. “What would that be?”

     “Well, let’s sit down, at least. I keep feelin’ like we’re gonna turn a corner and find a skeleton or something. Talk about a mood killer.”

 

           

     In the altitude of the castle’s precipice, thin mist pours into the bay windows. You’ve wandered into what was probably the bedroom of someone very important, its mirror freckled with tarnish, large desks overflowing with arm-length scrolls. The chamber lies at a dead end of the top floor, an intense light shining from the open windows. It’s not that they’re broken – they never had any glass at all. The old inhabitant must have been accustomed to the cold.

     It’s awfully quiet. Jade toes ahead of you, running her fingertips on the bronze of an aging footboard. Her reflection slides past her on the opposite wall, and it makes you jump to see the distorted image all marred with black. Jade’s silhouette is blurred at the edges as she hops onto the musty window seat. She ducks down to avoid the top of the windowsill and crouches down to sit on the ledge. The lenses of her glasses shine as she tilts her head back to look at you.

     “The seat’s been acquired,” she says. “What’s up the metaphorical sleeve?”

     Lacking a sylladex is starting to cramp your style. You pull out the awkwardly-wrapped chocolate you’ve been keeping in the folds of your time poncho, and her eyes roll back dangerously far into her head.

     “You didn’t.”

     “I did. You can give Nanna shit if you want – she’s an enabler. Was very enthusiastic about helpin’ me out.”

     She takes it away from you, lips pursed thin. You give her a shit-eating smile that says _what are going to do about it?_ Jade finagles with the double knot, digging her fingernails between the grainy ribbon.

     “I’m guessing Nanna didn’t help you with the presentation.”

     “Honestly, your lack of appreciation for my postmodern performance art comes as a shock. Thought you’d be more supportive.”

     Jade responds by unraveling the ribbon and flicking it at you. The wind blows it directly into your face, and you blow it out of your way. Then it simply sticks between your feathers, and you have to toss it into the room behind you. It tumbles across the marbled squares of black and white. The thin cardboard packaging pops open, and you reach your talons in.

     “Dibs.”

     Jade lifts it out of your reach. “Dave!” She sticks her tongue out at you and picks a gold-foiled piece of chocolate out of the box, setting it aside so you can’t pilfer it. The wrapping makes a tinny sound, too high up in the air to echo.

     "Tastes kinda salty,” she says after a minute. She takes another bite anyway. You should have figured – Nanna’s alchemized groceries always have the faint tang of salt. That’s the price you pay when you don’t want your food to give you dysentery.

     “Maybe I didn’t think this through. Doesn’t chocolate kill dogs.”

     “Ha, ha.” Jade starts to hand you one of the chocolates, then swipes it out of your reach and eats it. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t developed an allergy to theobromine, but if anything happens to me, tell the plants I’ll always love them.”

     “’And Miss Harley’s estate goes to… that lovely pot of oranges in the corner. Congrats on your inheritance.’” You make a grab for the box, and Jade shrieks with surprised laughter. The chocolate unwraps nicely with the length of your claws. She’s right – it’s salty, but you force yourself to focus on the caramel instead.

     “Man, this would be a five star experience if it was a little less grimy and came with a mini-fridge of sham-pag-nee.”

     Jade knocks you in the arm for mispronouncing champagne – probably because she thinks you’re making fun of her problem with garbling unfamiliar words. Just last week she put the emphasis in “radiator” on the “di,” and you laughed so hard you cried.

     “Hey, beatin’ up on me is not the answer. If you wanna fling the contents of the library into the core for fun, that’s your business.”

     She stretches her legs out, and their muscles quiver. It makes you nervous to see her limbs splayed out over the mountainous drop to the bottom of the planet.

     “I think that inflicting more property damage to the battlefield would misalign with the _normalcy_ of this nice, _normal_ day.”

 

     She isn’t fooling anyone. Every time she’s here, she starts taking out her cabin fever on the remains of the Skaian war. A strained nerve works away in her jaw, and you can tell she’d like to send everything that isn’t bolted down into the abyss. You think maybe it’s too late to change venues to LOFAF or something, then scold yourself for suggesting the battlefield in the first place. After a while, the plumes of smoke start to look the same.

     The anxiety that taps away at the inside of your skull takes form in other ways, too. Training has gotten more intense – you both have minor scars on your arms from careless mistakes, bruises from misfired rifles. Jade runs herself ragged climbing the endless echelons of the god tiers, only collapsing into a gelatinous pile of sore muscles once her levels reach the next shiniest, premium-est number. Even teleporting to the shelter of air conditioning saps the energy out of her, so you have to sling her arm over your shoulder and help her back to your room. She was so determined to skimp out on the next session altogether, and now she’s dead set on being the greatest force of nature out of all of you.

     It’s good to have a goal to keep you going, you guess.

     You aren’t safe from the distortion of time, either. Your character continues to bend between this timeline’s fingers, bleeding together like Play-Doh left at a preschooler’s mercy. You know that you are still the same person as before. You have his face (mostly), and his memories (to an extent), and his name (depending on who you ask). You are still you, but… different. And Jade is still the same Jade you’ve always liked, but… weighted down. Smudged and damp at the corners, features sponged away with strain. Fragments of yourselves split from the surface and expose themselves to the air, and anyone’s hands are likely to leave their mark, to transfigure them for better or worse. Pieces of you and pieces of Jade have arranged themselves in a shattered mosaic, green and orange becoming a brilliant and unfathomable and painful yellow.

     You know that you are still the same person as before. You have his face and his memories and his name. But something in your programming has rewired and rebooted itself, and the result is that you are no longer sure who the first version of you was. You have to be the same, because you don’t know how you’ve changed, because you have no reference. No system restore, no backup drive.

 

     Jade’s heels thump against the slick marble of the exterior wall, and she turns her head gently to the side when you lean over and rest your head on her shoulder. Your wings flex outward and sweep across the window seats.

     “I can’t believe it’s only been six months,” you say. “Feels like we’ve been doing this forever.”

     She reaches her arm across your chest to graze your other cheek. Her hands have chilled in the cold, and you feel goosebumps rise higher on your arms.

     “That’s how time seems to work out here, isn’t it?” she asks. “Two days ago feels like an hour ago. Three days ago feels like a month ago.”

     “Yeah.”

     With your ear pressed to her skin, you can hear the sound of Jade’s jaw working away from the inside. She pushes the chocolate box to the safety of the window seat and nestles her face against the top of your head. You scrunch up your nose when her hair tickles you, but you don’t move to brush them away.

     “Hey, Dave?”

     “Huh.”

     “Do you think we’d still be doing this if. Well. If everything went according to plan?”

     The question both surprises and tires you. You take a moment to digest it. In a world where the Land of Wind and Shade was a whole planet and John Egbert was regularly popping his head in to give you shit about your expired Dave license and you actually slept in your own room, would you find yourselves here right now? Would the chaos and the roaring wave of teenaged bullshit and the ostentatious lack of existential _misery_ chisel you apart and send you hurdling in separate directions?

     Your heart pounds with _ifs_ , _ands_ , and _buts_ , and you sigh deeply.

     “I definitely would have asked you out eventually. I’m sure of that. It would have gone differently, though.”

     “Differently how?”

     You bury your face deeper in the crook of her neck, where the skin heats up and you can glean some warmth from the mountain mist. “Hard to tell, ain’t it. Would have taken me a lot longer. Would have been draggin’ my feet, so to speak. Would have been a lot of distractions, like regularly scheduled meals and video games and twice the pranks to duck and cover from.”

     “We’d be different people.”

     You squeeze your eyes shut. “That too. I’d be a bigger pain in the ass, probably.”

     “What makes you say that?”

     A heavy draft comes in from the outside colonnade. The chamber doors bang against the walls when they’re blown fully open, wood and metal clattering against marble. It blows Jade’s hair forward, and you scrunch your mouth up so their tickling doesn’t make you sneeze.

     “I don’t know. It was hard enough telling people how I felt about anything. Like, in what fucking universe would I have a heart-to-fucking-heart with your grandma? All it would take is a more crowded social circle to push me back into my hole in the wall. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to divulge dark personal revelations with more than an exclusive group of people.” You fidget with your hands. “I don’t know. I’m not making sense.”

     Jade stiffens. “You’re worried that John would have given you grief about being a sprite.”

     You opt out of answering.

     “I wouldn’t have let him get away with that. I know I wouldn’t have.”

     “It wouldn’t really help much, would it?”

     You swallow your words before you blame your skeletons in the closet on her brother. It may have been him who first lit the spark, the tiny seed of doubt that maybe you are not as important as you thought you were, that your sacrifices did not stack up high enough to carry your team to victory, but now is not the time. Now is not the place.

     “All I’m saying is that it takes a lot for me to poke my head out the birdhouse. Catch me huddled in a musty pile of straw and sunflower seeds, makin’ disturbing sounds when squirrels come skittering by. I’d be so bottled up with repressed nihilistic despair that it’d be nigh impossible to deal with me for more than ten consecutive minutes.”

     Jade adjusts herself so that you’re closer together. She warms her arms by linking yours together and stealing the heat from your elf cloak’s fleecy fabric.

     “That being said, I still would have asked you out. Whether you would have run for the hills from the Keanu Reeves-actin’ motherfucker is a whole other guess. I know I’m a piece of work.”

     “You can’t undo the fistbump, Dave,” Jade murmurs. She links your arms tighter. “It’s so official that it transcends timelines. You’ll get dealt with under any and all circumstances.”

     A smile itches at the corners of your mouth. “We’re the Bear Grylls of dealing with it. Man vs. Skaia.”

     “I suppose it was a dumb question, wasn’t it? There’s no way to tell how things would be different.” She crosses her legs to warm them, so you wind your sprite tail around them to assist. “All these timelines run parallel to each other, right? They break off all around us and keep sprinting ahead as planned while we’re left sitting here. Call it morbid or futile or anything you like, but I keep catching myself wondering what our alpha selves are doing right now. I wonder if they’re still awkwardly toeing around each other.”

     “‘Alpha self’ is a subjective term with me, but I get what you mean. Whatever shit’s going down, I’m probably still hardcore trippin’ over myself. Making shitty TV movie renditions of Mr. Darcy look like a summer camp counselor.”

     “It’s hard to imagine that you’d be bad company, though. I’m sure I’d like you either way. Who knows, maybe I’d beat you to the chase.”

     “Be careful, Jade. If I swoon and faint, you’ll fall out the window with me.”

     Jade smothers her laugh by pressing her hand to her face. Her face is flushed – maybe with the cold that pools the blood in her nose and cheeks – and she takes her fingers away to kiss you quickly on the corner of your mouth. You can see through your nearly closed eyes that she’s smiling shyly. She leans forward again, cupping your face in her palm. You return the gesture to push the draft out from between you, clasping your hand over hers and biting her bottom lip. The skin of her face is as frigid as your own, chilled with the mist of the upper atmosphere. Your other hand moves to rest at her upper thigh, and it takes a powerful head wind of arctic air to blast you apart with the sting of harsh ice. The hair flies to obscure Jade’s face, and she laughs as she pushes it out of her face. She’s even redder now.

     “Hey, lemme trade a question for a question.”

     “Okay, shoot.”

     You peel your hands off of her, and she pulls up one of her legs to fold it across the windowsill. “You said that could tell the difference between me and the other dude. The certified alpha version. Original Kroger brand Dave. Do you still feel that way? I mean, is it easier to tell the difference?”

     Jade sways in her spot. The scrolls that have been blown onto the floor breathe across the carpet and crinkle together in the corners of the room. “Oh, that’s easy. It’s a lot more noticeable now.”

     “Oh.” You pick at the hard plates on your fingers. “Um, how?”

     “For one thing, I think you’ve gotten nicer.”

     “Okay, like I wasn’t always a ball of sunshine.”

     Jade draws her legs up to her chin and nestles against you. The chill shudders through you, and you drape your left wing tightly around her shoulders.

     “I never thought you were _mean_ ,” she says. “Maybe you were always nice, in a way, but it was hard for you to express it.”

     “So opposed to alpha Dave, I’m less of a tight-ass.”

     Jade yelps with laughter. “You could say that!”

     “Nice.”

     “You have to admit it, though. I mean, the letter you sent me for my birthday was two sentences long at _most_. And it was written on loose-leaf.”

     “You know what they say, Jade. Less is more.”

     “Sure, sure.”

     The wind changes directions. Far below you, a hunk of rock breaks off the mountain and tumbles down the crags.

     “You don’t try as hard to be cool, either. That’s a difference, too – you’ve embraced how dorky you truly are on the inside.”

     You flap your wing so that the feathers jostle her, and Jade shrieks in protest and swats your shoulder.

     “No, but seriously. It’s a _good_ difference. It’s _character_ development.” She hooks her hand with the crook of your elbow, thumbing the skin where the rough plates fade to human flesh. “So that’s why I don’t think you’re a piece of work, or a tight-ass. As long as you know you’re trying to break out of that eggshell and connect with people again, that counts for something. I already know that it’s hard to do.”

     “Thanks for the bird pun.”

     “I try.”

     You tap Jade on the tip of her shoulder, pointing one claw at the window seat. She nods in agreement, and you both shift yourselves off of the sill. Jade uses the Green Sun to draw the dark red curtains, and the wind dies as the heavy velvet blocks out the chill. The cushions on the seat are musty, a little clumpy from disuse. Like an antique chair in a museum, roped off so the guests don’t sit. Jade shivers and scoots into your right wing.

     “So if you feel differently about Dave. Or, uh, like, if you think he’s so high strung… what would you have done?”

     “What would I have done if….?” Jade rakes her fingers through her hair and draws it in two even lengths down her chest.

     “If he was out there huntin’ frogs with you, and he happened to say something. Like, ‘hey, Jade, if we don’t get killed by the wolf man or a giant lizard, do you wanna be my Club Penguin girlfriend.’”

     Jade shakes her head, and it takes so long for her to say anything that you’re sure you’ve crossed a line.

     “Sorry,” you blurt. “I know you don’t like to talk about it. Who would want to, I mean, sounds like he totally pulled the rug out from under you.” Your talons click together. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m asking here. But like, what would you have said?”

     Jade tilts her head to look at the arched ceiling. The crown molding is etched with gilded ivy, little songbirds swooping to pluck berries with their beaks.

     “I kind of always got the feeling that he… that you both. Um. That something was there.” Jade’s hands twist in her lap, but she doesn’t readjust herself or move away from you like she usually does when she’s embarrassed. “It was hard not to notice, especially when the others were always telling me how differently you talked about me.”

     You exhale a low hiss. “Snitches,” you mutter.

     “I guess I liked the attention, too. I didn’t really think about it that much, though. Too many other things were always happening.”

     “Ah, yes. The whirlwind that is Jade Harley’s daily life. So many tasks to be done in the middle of the Pacific.”

     Jade sticks her tongue out. “Many, _many_ things. I simply did not have time for silly romances.” She folds her legs so that her knees lean against your sprite tail. “Actually, you know what? That isn’t true. I did have a crush for a while on this girl from Neopets.”

     You smack you hand over your mouth. “No way.”

     “Yes, Neopets dot com. Laugh it off.”

     A stuttering laugh bursts out of you. “I’m not laughing,” you cackle. “Neopets is a legitimate platform for meeting babes.”

     “Don’t I know it.”

     You toe around the elephant in the room. “Can I ask what charms this mystery girl possessed.”

     “Her pets had really nice pages. They were coded well, you know? It was classy. We talked sometimes because we used the same boards, but then her account got frozen for something dumb.” She shrugs.

     “So if I had a fancy vampire dog with a tragic backstory and an elegant profile, my chances would have been better.”

     “If that’s what you want to tell yourself.”

     “Thank you, Neopets dot com staff, for eliminating the competition. Now I’m no longer neck and neck with starfairygurl6067.”

     “Incorrect. Unfortunately your lack of petpage coding skills would leave you much further behind than ‘neck and neck.’”

     You itch your clavicle. “Okay, new scenario: Y’all are frog hunting and Dave asks you out in the most roundabout way possible. Would you rebuff him on account of not having the magic Neopets dot com touch? ‘Sorry, dude, your pets have numbers in their names. Total turn off.’”

     “If he had said something, I probably would have told him to stop wasting time and keep hunting for frogs!”

     You crow at this. Jade falls towards you as both of your laughter shakes her from her position. As she calms down and her giggling fizzles out, she rests her face near your collarbone.

     “So, I don’t think you caught the tail end of anything he was planning to do or say, and I certainly haven’t pinned any feelings I had for him on you either. They just weren’t there. We were friends, and that was all. Or… we are? If he doesn’t hate me when we land.”

     “Okay. So you would have cruelly dumped me on the iceberg in Club Penguin is what you’re saying.”

     “The most dramatic of penguin rejections! The forum would be swamped for days.”

     You dig your fingers into the top of her hair to sway her head side to side, and she groans with a canid whine. “‘Can you believe the scrub who got his feathered ass handed to him? I saw it myself. His username was Xx_Akwete_Purrmusk_69xX and he was so devastated that he just stood there for hours, keysmashing at bystanders.’”

     “That is exactly the kind of hammy thing you’d do, you big ham.”

     “Oink oink motherfucker.”

     “You should stick with the caws. They’re nicer.”

     The prickle of unease leaves your chest, and somehow it feels easier to breathe. A rush of affection blindsides you, and it’s all you can do not to wrap you both up in your wings and stay like that. You mull over what she’s just said, repeating it over and over to soak it in as the Undeniable Truth, memorizing it for the next night that you start to wonder if maybe you’re a voodoo vessel for the authentic Dave experience.

     You chew the inside of your mouth. “You didn’t think it was a big deal to have a crush on that girl?”

     “What do you mean?”

     “I mean, because… you’re….”

     “Also a girl? Pff.” Jade waves you off. “I had zero human contract growing up. What use was it to care if someone was a boy or a girl or anything else? If I liked them, I liked them. No one told me it was right or wrong.” She traces her jawlines with her fingers. “I know that today is dedicated to being ‘normal,’ as if the world hasn’t ended or anything, but maybe you should let that pillar of your fancy society die.”

     “So you just… didn’t give a shit.”

     “Of course not. Do you? About yourself.”

     A violent shudder starts at the tip of your tail and sputters to the top of your skull. “Shit, I don’t know. I never really thought about it. It just is what it is.”

     “Because that’s how you really feel, or because you felt you had to?”

     You break eye contact and stare at the war documents crinkled by the bedposts, tossed about by the wind until they’ve come to rest in the middle of the room. The words that come to mind are frightening in their weight, not because they repulse you but because you have never allowed them to set in as anything serious, as anything greater than a joke. At home, your school might have collapsed into rubble if the student body went a week without someone getting shoved in a locker for being _queer_. That’s the word those Western guys really loved, among worse. But that wasn’t your problem, because that wasn’t you – you were neither the queer making a scene of themselves, the queer making the mistake of  existing out in the open, nor the asshole beating the shit out of them. A third party unrelated.

     You felt bad for those kids. They didn’t do anything wrong, except make it obvious what they were. But what is obvious? How can you tell, how can you know? Were all of those kids even gay, or did your school pounce on anyone who didn’t look like they were trying out for quarterback? Could you have been a target if you hadn’t made yourself camouflaged?

     Is that how you feel, or did you feel you had to? Half of you tries to find that answer, and the other half repels magnetically against it. Maybe you weren’t a third party after all, because you weren’t beating the shit out of anyone, but you _were_ ripping on them in your jokes and your comics and your raps. A conversation with John wasn’t complete if one of you didn’t call the other gay in some convoluted backflip of insecure heterosexuality. Isn’t that just as bad? Holy shit, and your comics had so many hits. How many people walked away from your website thinking you believed it was acceptable if all those kids were left suspended and bloody-nosed and empty-backpacked because of some jack-off who decided to fuck with them?

     That’s right – you were always calling each other gay. Why was that? When did it start? You don’t remember. Maybe you were eleven. Maybe you were twelve. That wasn’t limited to Texas – it happened in John’s corner of the Northwest, too. What kind of horrible machination was churning away to let this cycle continue no matter where you went? The queer kids were the others, the ghostly silhouettes appearing in eerie reminder that what you think of yourself is not always what you are. If it was possible for them to not like girls, or worse – _both_ – then would it not be possible for you as well? And the fear of that possibility left them bloody-nosed and suspended and empty-backpacked.

     If you kept calling each other gay, if it kept being ironic and a joke and a ha-ha-funny-not-serious-thing-to-say, then you could excuse yourself from the bubble. You could establish yourself as Normal, as Safe and Untouchable. John would know that you would never actually flirt with him, would never actually _say_ anything, because if you did, of course it was a joke. Of course you were kidding. Because that wasn’t you. Because if you didn’t, if you didn’t make sure, then everyone would think, everyone would know you were….

     Your face feels hot. You press your hand to your cheeks to drag them down your chin, scraping the skin with your claws. Distantly, you hear Jade asking if you’re all right, but all you can do is stare at the swirling floor, at the gilt lines of gold separated the squares of black and white.

     How many crushes have you stomped out before you even knew what they were?

 

     “Dave?”

     You force your mouth to close. “Uh… I already. Have a lot on my plate, Jade. I don’t know if I can handle another crisis of self.”

     “It’s only a crisis if you make it out to be a big deal.” Jade crosses her legs, one of them still using your tail for support. She unwraps a crinkling chocolate and picks off the hazelnuts under the surface. “Why do you think it would be hard to think about it?”

     “Because it’s… I don’t know, who the fuck wants to question their entire life out of the goddamned blue?”

     “You’re questioning your entire life?”

     It occurs to you that your hands are trembling. “Sort of.”

     “Then I’m assuming I’ve struck a nerve.”

     “Sort of!”

     “I’d apologize, but I do not see what the problem is.”

     “Yeah, well, I’m sure it’s all fine and dandy when you don’t have to come out to a dog because he doesn’t know what words are or even have a concept of his own gender –”

     Jade cocks her head. “Bec was a sexless creature born from a test tube, blame my grandpa for calling him a boy.”

     “Whatever. When you go to fucking public school and everything on TV tells you that being gay is a big fat joke and you hear the word ‘fag’ so many times that you start to forget what it means to begin with, it’s pretty fucking distressing to think that maybe you might not be straight. Like, what do I do with that information?”

     “Do you have to do anything with it at all?”

     “No, I’m serious! How can you just walk around being so willfully fucking ignorant about such a huge thing? Like, how many interactions did I have with people that were unnecessarily stunted because I didn’t want them to think shit about me? Oh my _god_.” You hang your head in your hands, scraping your talons through your hair. “Where does that even put me? Like, I’m dating you, aren’t I?”

     “Yes.”

     “So what the fuck?”

     “Did you not hear what I already said? No one ever told me that liking girls was bad, so I _did_ , and I’m dating _you_ , aren’t I? There aren’t two separate camps that you have to stay in for the rest of your life. Honestly, I’m not even sure _why_ you people in your silly little society insisted on making such a big deal of it.”

     “You really don’t understand why it’s a big deal. I literally cannot tell you how fucked up this has me.”

     “Dave, I’m going to put this as gently as I can.” She balls the candy foil into a tiny gold ball and flicks it into the air, where it disappears in a static shock of green. “Look where we are right now. We exist between the bookends of two universes. You have bird DNA and no legs, and I’ve been biologically fused with an alien taking the form of a dog. We’re sitting on a planet that I’ve forced into the size of a tennis ball, and we saw the entire Earth go up in nuclear fallout. My biological mother has been resurrected from the dead, and _you_ could time travel, for goodness sake, you’ve lived in _multiple_ timelines. You’re living through all of this without having a complete meltdown, and yet your world stops turning when you consider that there may be an inkling of a chance you’re bisexual? Come on.”

     The word makes you flinch. She punctuates her thought by popping the rest of her chocolate into her mouth. Jade folds her arms tightly across her chest, letting you know that she will not be budged.

     “No one is left here to judge you, Dave.”

     “And there’s no Earth left to know what this might’ve been like in the real world,” you mutter. “You could’ve gone off with your Neopets babes and have that experience and no fucking consequences would arise, because there was no one on that island to call you names or lay a finger on you. I just have to be stuck remembering all the guys I might have actually really liked, but just beat myself into thinking it was nothing.”

     Jade exhales slowly and lowers her shoulders. She leans against your arm, her cheek almost brushing your ear.

     “There are always consequences, Dave. It didn’t matter that no one lived on that island to give me a hard time. Hate always finds its way back to you. I saw people I admired driven out of communities. Sometimes, that person was almost me.”

     A heavy hand presses down on your insides, like all your organs are being forced into your gut. “How come I didn’t know about this until now? How come you didn’t tell anyone?”

     She shrugs. “It never came up. I didn’t want anyone to worry.”

     “Shit, Jade. If I had known you were… like….”

     Jade looks at you, her hair sweeping against the side of your face. “I don’t bother with it. Let’s just call it pansexual.”

     “…Okay, well, maybe if I had known that, maybe I would’ve thought twice before calling shit ‘faggoty’ and not fucking doing anything when guys in my class were literally finding razorblades in their desks.”

     “That actually happened?”

     “Something to that effect. Sliced up his writing hand a little.”

     “Geez.” Jade sighs through her nose. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Dave. How would I have known it’d make a difference?”

     “I don’t know.” You rub your temples. “I don’t know, that’s the thing. I guess you wouldn’t have known.”

     “Do you need time to think about it? Should I….?”

     “No, stay here.” You lean back against the curtain and rest your hand on Jade’s knee. “I’m sorry. I’m trying not to freak out.”

     She leans back as well, bonking your tail with the knee you’re holding. “Does every Valentine’s Day end with debates on sexuality?”

     “No, we’re just weird.”

     “Well, that was established a long time ago.”

     You crack into laughter, and you have no idea what’s funny at all, but you don’t calm down until the tears have sprung into your eyes and your stomach aches. Jade keeps watching you out of the corner of her eye, a kind but worried smile on her face. When you stop laughing, she goes back to leaning against you. She pulls your wing over her shoulder like a blanket.

     “I’m glad you convinced me to come out here. It was nice.” She burrows deep into your feathers. “Thank you.”

     “What can I say, I’m a connoisseur of smooth moves.”

     “Goodness, I’m swooning.”

     She offers you the last chocolate, and when you move to break it in an even half, some of the crumbs fall onto the window seat. You take the wrapping from her and ball it up in your fist like a stress ball, a slow and steady headache easing its way into your brain.

     “It’s going to be difficult, isn’t it?” she asks. She doesn’t have to clarify.

     “Yeah,” you sigh. “Yeah, to say the least. There’s no online help forum anymore. Hell, I’m the only human guy here.”

     “I think you’ll be all right,” Jade murmurs. She closes her eyes. “You’ve already lived through worse.”

     “I’ve gotten gouged by a sword and suffered amputation, and somehow rethinking my hetero-ness is the straw that shattered the camel’s spine. I must be messed up or something.”

     “Not messed up, just too far up the ass of your precious civilization.” One of your feathers has landed on her shoulder, and she plucks it off to set it on the top of your head. “But that’s okay. I’m willing to help you unlearn it. The student becomes the teacher.”

     “You’ve got a lot to work on with your Powerpoint skills, though. I’ll help you out with the graphics. Get you those premium asceticism ClipArts.”

     Jade laughs. “You may not know how to code a petpage, but at least you can put together a mean slideshow.”

     “I’m one step ahead of you yet, starfairygurl6067.”

     “Being alive helps.”

     You take the feather off the top of your head and stick it behind her ear. “True.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha you thought this was gonna be hetero


	37. Chapter 37

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 April, 2010

 

     The entire day comes and goes and you hardly say anything to each other.

     Your legs are tangled in blankets, sweat beading in the crooks of your knees. Once or twice you try to move your hands, but all you can manage is a weak trembling in your fingertips. The difference between your skin and the bedsheets is unclear. Your muscles solidify, catatonic, and your eyes go in and out of focus as you stare up at the ceiling. In the rust that smatters it, you identify an antler, a bowler hat, the side profile of an old man’s face.

                       

     If you could quiet your head enough to fall asleep, would you see him in the bubbles?

 

     When evening sprawls over you, you hear the sheets rustle. Your legs twinge to react, a scant sensation returning to your toes. Your view of the ceiling is obscured by Davesprite leaning over you, your face in his hands.

     “You’re crying,” he murmurs. Your throat is dry – you try to swallow.

     “I know.”       


	38. Chapter 38

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 23 May, 2010

 

     The Acheron wails a warbling roar, its massive arms tied together. It stomps on the muddy earth with its bowed legs, trying to writhe itself free.

     “Done!” Jade yells from above. She tugs on both of her bullwhips, convulsing with green-yellow light. The branch she’s perched on bends under her feet, and a few red blossoms spiral towards the ground. “Take him out!”

     “Got it.”

     Almost invisible in its shadow, Jade has dashed around the Acheron’s feet to restrain its tree trunk-sized wrists in the loops of her whips. Leaping into the branches, acrobatic, she’s pulled its limbs upward until she’s up in the canopy and the underling is left with its heavy limbs held aloft. The weight of them makes it gurgle with protest.

     You’ve accelerated far enough into your training to deserve a rifle that is ungodly in size. The Proton Cannon’s butt is a heavy strain on your shoulder, even after Jade has shrunk it to half its original size. You arch your arms into position, and when the cannon goes off, the metal lurches back to skim your jaw. A sharp buzzing shrieks in your ears.

     The Plutonium Acheron makes the soil tremor with the force of its pained scream – or maybe that’s just the kickback from the cannon. Its stony gray skin, flecked with cracks of chartreuse, blasts apart and smells sulfuric as it dissolves into grist. It’s a rotten fog that sweeps across the clearing, and from up in the trees you can hear Jade coughing into the crook of her arm. The Proton Cannon lands barrel-down in the dirt, and you gasp with relief when it leaves its perch on your shoulder.

     “Fetch the grist, will you?” Jade calls. “Suffering from technical difficulties up here, by which I mean this smell is getting to me.”

      

     You swoop over the pile of green and silver grist, giant shapes that look as strangely appetizing as laundry detergent pods. Your tail flicks over them, and they make a sizzling sound as they disappear. The reward this underling has given up isn’t suitable for much other than crafting nuclear weapons, but grist is grist.

     “ _God_ , these things reek something awful,” you gag. Your nostrils flare.

     “Worst piñata of all time,” Jade agrees. She jumps from the top of the tree, her long hair trailing behind her. A pile of curling, turquoise leaves crunches under her when she lands. “Are your ears all right?”

     “What?”

     “Are your _ears_ all right?”

     “ _What_?”

     Jade rolls her eyes. She stops in front of you, blipping the bullwhips into her strife specibus. Her palms are stained from the leathery handles. “All right, all right, I get it. Alchemize yourself some earplugs.”

     You nudge her in the arm. “Must be nice to have four ears. If one set gets its eardrums blasted to hell, at least you’ve got a backup pair.”

     “Having four ears _is_ quite nice. They’re a permanent accessory.” She flips her hair dramatically, and both ears stand to attention. “It’s a lot of responsibility to be so cute.”

     “Hey, if the shoes fit.”

     Her ears shift to the sides, flicking and swiveling, and Jade’s eyebrows furrow. “You might want to pick that cannon back up.”

     You rub your temple. “Uh, why?”

     The ringing in your ears is starting to fade, but not enough to let you hear the underbrush rustling. Attracted by the sound of the cannon and the stench of the Acheron’s death, a horde of Thorium basilisks have poked their heads out to investigate. They give crocodilian hisses, forked tongues darting out of their mouths. This variety almost looks powdery, their skin granular and silver. The teeth poking out of their eerily elongated mouths shine like quartz. A shudder quakes through you at the unsettling twisting of their snakelike bodies.

     “That’s why,” Jade says.     

     “Man, _fuck_ the Cannon,” you groan. “You still got the rifles from last time? Those don’t fuck up my arms as much.”

     Jade keeps her eyes on the underlings, but she launches the Green Sun Streetsweeper from her sylladex and tosses it your way. You hold your hand out for the other one. She doesn’t notice, though, so you snap your fingers until she glances over and gives you a look.

     “You can’t do it one-handed,” she says. Right after she says it, the first basilisk makes a leap at her, and she smashes its head in with the morning star she zaps into her hand. Its shriek dissolves into the sound of falling grist. Something like glitter grazes across her hands and disappears – she’s climbed another half-level.

     “You’re gonna kill ‘em all if I beef it, anyway.”

     Jade exhales, and in the next second you have the Girl’s Best Friend in your other hand. You adjust your arms, and they clunk mechanically as you set yourself in position. Now you know why Jade doesn’t need to use her space powers to do heavy lifting – holding each of these things one-handed qualifies as a gym workout. No use in using the scopes; you’ll have to hope for the best.

     The basilisks crouch themselves low to the dirt and wiggle their tails, a gesture that tells you they’re about to spring. You lash your tail out to draw their attention to you. It works – two of them spring, and your arms lurch back as you pull both triggers. They burst like sacks of dust, and a metallic smell is left in the air. Nice! Well, the fact that you hit your mark is nice; the smell is not. You wobble, thrown off balance, but you roll your shoulders back and hold your stance steady.

     While you focus on the underlings slithering out of the underbrush, one that’s farther away is getting dealt with by Jade. She rams the handle of the morning star into the back of its throat, then holds it aloft and gives it a swift kick in the ribcage before it can flap away with its leathery wings. The first few drops of grist land on her foot and vanish. Four down, four to go.

     Riled up, the remaining quartet goes all-out. Two of them have long whiskers that tremble and twitch, and they scream like cats and lunge at you with their claws out. You beat one back with the brunt of the Streetsweeper, and it yelps as it hits the ground. The other gets a bullet to one of its front legs – a little sloppy, but it writhes and spits before giving up its reward. The second one gives one last hiss, and you spin the Streetsweeper to hit its head in with the rifle’s butt.

     The last two are hard to miss – they jingle with the bells that hang from their harlequin collars, all muddy and frayed from living out in the woods. One uses its wings to make itself bigger, rearing up until it towers above you on its lizard legs. It tries to bring its weight down on you, but you push the barrel of the Girl’s Best Friend into the hollow of its neck. For a horrible moment you think its blood and guts have splattered down on you, but it’s just the kickback of the gun and the force of the underling imploding. The remaining basilisk almost manages to nip your tail. You strike out your tail and wrap it around its neck, squeezing hard and pressing the Streetsweeper between its slit nostrils. It convulses, turns from light gray to a stormy black. You’re so fascinated by its shifting colors that it you don’t even realize that you’re dragging its death out. You shudder, disgusted, and your tail unravels. It wheezes, sucking in oxygen, and while it’s squeezing its eyes shut you shoot it in the face. The sound of the shot echoes, and the clearing is silent – the hummingbirds fled the trees a long time ago.

     Your chest heaves, gold sweat beading on your forehead.

     “See? Didn’t….” You pause to inhale. “…beef it this time.” You’re seeing stars now. Pinpricks of white fall into the center of your field of sight.

     “I see that.”

     Jade’s voice comes from above. You whirl in each direction, and it occurs to you that Jade has disappeared. You look up into the trees and see her sitting on a low branch, swinging her legs and making the vines sway.

     “Hey, it’s the Cheshire Dog,” you pant. “What’re you doin’ up there.”

     “You looked like you had it under control,” replies Jade. “And you did! Good job.”

     “I try.” You shake your shoulders out. “You can take your guns back, Sensei.”

     The rifles crackle out of your hands, and a static shock tingles between your fingers where they made contact. Jade stretches her arms above her head and leaps down from the tree for the second time today, congratulating you with an obligatory post-training fist bump.

     “You’re getting rather good at this,” she says. She plants her fists on her hips. “I _might_ be able to say I was impressed, if I was not so horribly demanding.”

     “Tell me about it. I wonder if it’s too late to switch my strife kind.”

     “Much too late!” Jade chirps. “Guns are my shtick. Absolutely copyrighted. Those are the rules.”

     “Some rules comin’ from the Girl of a Thousand Specibi.”

     If you were to give Jade any more sword fighting lessons, it’d be her way of making you feel like you’re being productive. As a god tier, Skaia has siphoned away any _real_ need for a strife specibus. There’s no Thor’s hammer or Artemis’ bow for her – anything and everything is easily within her mastery, and playing with swords was just the beginner’s level. Now, her specibus is chock full of whips, maces, crossbows, rapiers, axes and tridents that glide so effortlessly with her movements that it seems she’s always known how to use them. Training is all well and good so long as it amps up her levels – by now she should be at the platinum echelon of An American Werewolf in Skaia – but the name no longer fits. It’s not training, it’s just XP farming.

     “Thousand Specibi or no, guns are still my thing.” Jade yawns behind her hand and thumps you on the shoulder blade. The base of her hilltop tower can be seen just beyond the trees, and you head back into the jungle to weave your way home. If she isn’t wilting from exhaustion, Jade prefers going home the hard way, and if you’re particularly impatient, you might coast over the trees with your wings skimming the canopies, waiting for her to catch up. You’re content to hike today.

     “You are the kinda person the NRA would love to recruit.”

     Jade fakes a sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, maybe if my only hobbies were sniffing gunpowder and taking pictures of myself with dead deer. I’m not _that_ weird.”

     “You’re pretty close to being that weird.”

     Jade swats you in the arm, and the feathers on your forearm rise with your laughter. “Everyone has a _thing_ , Dave. For me it’s… like, green, and dogs, and awesome science. And awesome flowers! And guns. Stealing one of someone’s things is totally rude.”

     “You forgot chasing cats, and shredding on the bass, and listening to old people music.” You stop before she can wallop you for calling her a furry. “You got other shit to fall back on if I yoink the gun part from you. Also, as a born Texan I have the right by blood to that kinda business.”

     She pats the back of her hair in a way that lets you know she’s kidding. “Still. My shtick.”

     “Easy for you to say. I don’t think I could get away from swords if I tried. Kind of a shame, really. Damn things have given me enough trouble to last an infinite time loop.”

     “Why’s that?”

     A little brook bubbles across your path. Jade jumps over it, landing with a crunch on some twigs, and you use the tip of your tail to splash water at her.

     “Just because.”

     She scrunches up her nose at you. “It seems to me that if you don’t want anything to do with swords, you don’t have to!”

     “You make it sound easy.”

     Jade tosses her hands up. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much to it. Don’t want to use a sword? Then don’t pick one up. Congratulations, you’ve won.”

     You sigh deeply. “I think once Skaia burns them into the very mechanisms of your planet’s quest, it’s kind of a cosmic sign that you’re stuck with ‘em forever.”

     Jade is several paces ahead of you now, and you let her keep the lead. You thumb the deep crease in the middle of your chest, the ragged skin where your prototyping scar has sealed. It feels tenuously healed, like your claws could easily puncture it like paper and shred it open once more.

     “Call me superstitious or whatever, but I think if you’re given a blacksmith for a denizen and your entire progress relies on unearthing, shattering, and rebuilding the same shitty sword, then you’re being given a serious sign. Like maybe all versions of me are destined to be skewered like little cheese tubes on those plastic toothpicks that look like swords.”

     There’s a pause. Jade treads uphill, bending forward to balance herself on the rocks coming out of the mud. When she gets to level ground again, she twists her hand together behind her back.

     “The way I see it,” she starts, “is that Skaia tries to challenge us with the planet it gives us. No one is supposed to be comfortable with what they’re allotted. I don’t mean to pry, but it always seemed to me that you were very confident in your sword fighting skills. Maybe humble enough to admit whenever your brother beat you, but confident all the same. If Skaia coded something so familiar into your quest, maybe it was challenging you somehow.” Her ears twitch to follow the sound of a hummingbird flying above you. “Following your logic, my quest was a cryptic warning about my future career as a bioengineer. That couldn’t be further from the truth.”     

     “What was it, then.”

     She looks at you over her shoulder. “The magic of teamwork, of course.”

     “Hm.”

     This is where your sprite coding goes frizzy. As both the game guide and the former player of that game, there are patches where your programming becomes confused. To reveal crucial SBURB data or to not reveal crucial SBURB data – that is the question. Each meticulous step in your quest was mapped out clearly in your head, an effortless list of tasks that felt more like a mundane trip to the grocery store. What did any of it mean, though? What was the reason? You didn’t know. If Dave had asked, you would have shrugged and told him it was LOHAC’s lame shot at imitating Arthurian legend. Video games are always doing that, right? Hero’s journey, etcetera etcetera.

     So if Skaia was challenging you, what was its greater end? You can’t imagine any point to it other than another reminder of your incompetence. You couldn’t wield a sword, you couldn’t beat your brother, you couldn’t defend your brother, you couldn’t defend yourself.

     Then again, if you were incompetent in any way at all, could it really be pinned on you? You just shot down six basilisks, one rifle in each hand like motherfucking Rambo, and you’ve only been shooting for less than a year. You’re not a god tier, and your capacity for acquiring new weaponry skills is a little limited. That must mean that you’re _kinda_ good at follow instructions – that, and Jade genuinely wanted you to learn. So what’s that say about a decade of sword fighting which always left you flat on your ass?

     The trees sputter out. You push a long net of vines out of your way, picking the fallen petals from your feathers. Jade’s tower stretches above you, so high up that looking at the top gives the impression that the entire thing is about to topple over. She wipes her feet off on the front doorstep’s concrete slab, holding the door open for you to slip in past her. The foyer’s coolness is a welcome relief from the heavy humidity of the jungle. As has always been the case, your eyes are drawn to the delicate photograph of Jade’s sleeping-dead dreamself. The stitches down her eye are so fine that they’re almost lost in the picture.

     “Hey, Jade?”

     Jade pauses with her shoes halfway off, her hand on the hidden door to her grandfather’s office. The white laces are bright against the floor.

     “Do you ever wonder if you could have been abused?”

     Jade’s eyebrows crumple, and you feel the heat rise to the top of your face. She gives you a sideways look.

     “What?”

     Your hands take on a mind of their own and spider across your arms. “Shit. That was a dumb fuckin’ question. I mean, he died when you were little. Forget it.” You bite the inside of your mouth hard before you babble any more.

     “Well… no, you see. I. You just caught me off guard.” Jade titters nervously and kicks her other shoe off. Her toes flex in her green ankle socks. Her smile is painfully forced, the corners of her mouth pointed downward. She keeps her hand on the wall, thumbing the raised damask pattern. “Is there a reason you’re asking this?”

     “No. Yes. Maybe? I don’t know.” You rub the back of your head, shedding a couple of nervous feathers. “Sometimes it’s really hard to get a read on the guy. All these different guardians are givin’ me parenting method whiplash. I’m not asking you if he was a douchebag, just….”

     Jade’s eyes dart to the side, and you think you see her watching the fireplace the way you always do.

     “There are a lot of ways your guardian can let you down, even if they have no idea what they’re doing or how it will affect you,” she says lowly. She seems to want to open the office door, but thinks better of the idea and lingers on the other side. “I know my grandfather loved me. I know that _now_ , at least, but there were times when I wasn’t sure.”

     “How can you be sure,” you ask, “how can you suspect that, like, if he….”

     She smiles sadly. “It took me a very long time to learn what finally happened. After all, it’s hard to explain a bullet wound to the chest when you were never able to find the gun that created it.” Jade folds her arms and leans her back against the secret door. The shallow cups of candles she’s relit along the portrait flicker faintly, and both faces are distorted with soft orange shadows. “Imagine how it must have felt, then, when I found out what suicide was.” She closes her eyes, and it’s a while before they flutter open again. “I thought that the isolation must have gotten to him, after a while. I thought he must’ve been depressed because of me, or that he didn’t want to take care of me anymore.”

     “Seems hard to believe for someone who’d go to the trouble of preserving his kid’s corpse.”

     Jade’s lips twitch into a smile, but then it disappears again. “That didn’t occur to me. All I could think about was the hole in his chest. How could he have known that Bec would be able to take over in his place? For a long time, I thought he was content to let me waste away on that island. It hurt to consider, but there were so few other options. I started talking to what was left of him to create even the semblance of a connection.”

     You feel a sting in the back of your throat. It’s like you’ve been stricken into place – if you tried to comfort her now, she’d only shrink away.

     “You saw the photos in the office, didn’t you?” she asks after a while.

     You shake your head. It’s mostly true – you kept your paws off most of those boxes. Jade looks away from you and goes back to staring at her hands.

     “He had a family that he left behind because of me. A proper one, with a house and a yard and a neighborhood.”

     This surprises you. It requires a suspension of disbelief to consider that Gramps Harley could ever stand to live in the normal folk’s society. You sort of imagined he’d spent his youth hopping from shack to shack along the Amazon, tackling snakes and communicating with birds via whistling.

     “He didn’t even tell them about me.” Her voice breaks for the first time, and you feel your chest concave. “He had a normal family, and they didn’t _know_ about me, and I had no way to contact them. If he had told them where we were, someone would have gone looking. Someone would have found me, and I wouldn’t have grown up alone.” She looks to the mantel, and her hair flickers red with candlelight. “Who knows, anyway. Maybe Bec was so protective over me that he teleported away anyone who searched for us.”

     You distract your hands by running your fingers along your chest’s thick scar tissue. It’s tinted orange, just like the muscles under your skin.

     “I’m sorry,” you say when she stops speaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge anything up.”

     She shrugs, and when she looks over she already seems halfway over it. “My point is, adults do a lot of things that they don’t know will mess us up until it’s too late. It was just a bit of a long answer, wasn’t it?” Her smile seems more genuine this time.

     You’re not sure what to say.

     Jade exhales through her nostrils and tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s like she’s trying to expel everything she’s just said into the air’s molecules, willing them to disperse and vanish from memory.

     “Are you… I mean, are you sure there’s nothing you’d like to talk about?”

     You purse your lips, watching the carpet. Then you look up at her, really watching her face, and you know that the unavoidable will be crashing down on you soon. But for now, all you can do is shake your head.

     “Not just now. Just gimme some time. When that comes, there’s someplace I’d like to take you.”

 


	39. Chapter 39

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is where the disordered eating tag comes into play, so be careful i guess. thought id give a warning.

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 07 July, 2010

 

     As a child, you had many opportunities to blow up your entire island in a massive, radioactive mushroom cloud. Perhaps your grandfather forgot that chunks of raw uranium aren’t suitable for anyone without a degree, much less under the age of ten. Good thing for god tiering – as far as you can tell, SBURB has sponged away any cancerous cells that may have been lying dormant inside of you. Anyway, the point is that despite the odds, you were never dumb enough to cause a Chernobyl out in the middle of the ocean. For some reason, though, you’re a little scared that unsupervised pastry baking is going to be your downfall.

     Your pumpkins have finally stopped disappearing, and that means it’s time to start making pumpkin pie again. Watching Nanna should help you refine your technique – the ones you made when you were smaller were goopy and crumbly, and you had a tendency to eat so much and so quickly that you’d throw up. You’ve picked the fattest pumpkin you could find for this operation. Right now, it’s hollowed out on the counter, its sour insides oozing in one of the kitchen pots. Davesprite picks the seeds out between his fingers, gnawing on them like he thinks they’ll taste like birdseed.

     You’ve taken a science experiment approach to this. Every possible ingredient you’ll need has been lined up on the counter in order of size, paper towels at the ready. All you’re missing is a lab coat and goggles.

     “Nanna would be proud,” you say to the pumpkin slices. They look almost inedible, but once you get them in the oven they’ll be halfway ready to eat. You brush canola oil onto each piece – like an eyedropper into a petri dish! Sort of. “This is the one thing I’ve ever made myself that actually has animal products in it.”

     “Yeah, but I think you’re about eight too months too late for this, Martha Stewart. Pumpkin spice season is over.”

     “It’s never too late for pumpkins.”

           

     You have the kitchen to yourselves. The emergency lights are all that’s on, save for the light over the stove, and the empty cafeteria is eerie. You keep swiveling your ears, expecting to pick up the sounds of dinnertime conversation, but it’s all just mechanical thumps that burp out of the ventilation. Nanna has gone to bed for her nightly Sudoku ritual, so there’s no risk of the surprise being ruined. You keep your eyes peeled nonetheless in case she decides to make a midnight shortcake.

     “Can _cats_ eat pumpkins?” Jaspers asks in his toddler-like voice. He sniffs at the pot full of gutted pumpkin and crinkles his nose, whiskers arching. You’ve given him permission to stay down here as long as he leaves Davesprite alone, and the agreement is keeping him from breaking out in a nervous sweat.

     “Unfortunately not,” you tell him. “Nothing down here is for kitties, Jaspers. You should really join Nanna upstairs and see if she has any yarn for you.”

     “Don’t want to,” Jaspers mews. He weaves once around the kitchen island, and by Davesprite’s shudder you can tell they’ve brushed tails. “I wanna watch what you’re doing!” His blank little eyes almost trick you into thinking he doesn’t have an ulterior motive.

     The preheating oven hiccups with heat from the inside. Davesprite crunches a pumpkin seed in the back of his mouth. His face suggests that he thinks they’re gross, but he picks out another one anyway.

     “So this is your introduction to the world of non-vegan baking, huh.”

     “That’s right!”

     “Man, I can’t even imagine.” Davesprite’s jaw works away, and he looks up at the bolted ceiling. “You coulda let me live in a house with a kitchen fulla ingredients, and I’d still starve to death if nothing was ready to eat. Catch me eating sugar out of the bag. Like, I don’t even get what the point of preheating an oven _is_.”

     “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t cook very often. If I could get away with eating oranges for dinner, I did. For some reason I never got the hang of baking proper dough. It was always sort of clumpy.”

     You take the tray of pumpkin slice and slide it into the oven, metal hissing against metal. The fun part will come once they’re fully roasted. When you bend down to get a pie tin out of the drawer, you see that Jaspers is taking a bath under the island. He whips his head backward and forward in dramatic swipes to lick the fur of his chest, making slurping noises, and you have to bite back your laughter.

     “Still better than what I could manage. It’s weird how having money doesn’t guarantee you proper dinner.” He chews on one of his talons. “Wish I had known how to make shit out of flowers.”

     “As I’ve told you before and will tell you again, botany is a great hobby to take up.”

     “Yeah. Maybe.” He goes back to fiddling with the pumpkin seeds. When the oven starts to smell of roasted pumpkin, it’ll wash the acid odor out of the air. “How do you even plot out your meals every day? Did you ever just forget to eat?”

     “I was never _that_ forgetful,” you snort. In the same ceramic bowl that Nanna used to make a towering green cake, you pour in flour and salt. You almost bite your tongue trying to prevent the flour from rising up into your face. “As soon as anything in the garden was ready to be eaten, I stored it away to keep it fresh. And every six months, a crate of rations would be mailed down from a plane. I guess my grandfather started that up when we were still living together, and since he never cancelled the orders, the planes just kept coming.”

     Davesprite wipes a seed on his shirt to clean off the pumpkin gunk. He’s started arranging the seeds in meticulous spirals on the counter. You unwrap a stick of butter that Nanna has already started chipping away at, slicing off a square and plopping it in the bowl. This might take you a while, so you climb into one of the barstools.

     “When your diet hangs on fruit being in season and the twice-yearly visits of planes, everything has to be planned out pretty precisely.” You work a fork into the bowl, mashing the butter into the flour. It lumps together on the tines, so you scrape it against the sides of the bowl. Below, you hear the clicking of Jaspers’ teeth as he finishes a yawn. “I kept books where I would schedule out how much I could eat on a given day.”

     “Oh yeah, you were tellin’ me about that.”

     “Mm-hm. My scheduling was very strict. It got to the point where if I ate twenty minutes later than I was supposed to, I could feel it.”

     “Runnin’ a tight ship.”

     “Basically, yeah.”

     “Maybe not so much anymore.”

     You pause and stare him in the eye. He blinks at you slowly, his face squished as he rests his cheek in his hand. Behind him, the analog clock strikes quarter ‘til one.

     “Well. It’s different when obtaining food is no longer your sole responsibility.”

     Davesprite tilts his head, looking unconvinced.

     You realize that you’re stirring the bowl faster than before. The repetition keeps you from grinding your teeth. “You’re not much better yourself.”

     “I ain’t gotta eat at all if I don’t want to. Don’t have a real stomach, remember.”

     “I don’t need to, either.”

     “Okay. I’ll remember not to panic if you pass out and come sparkling to life like a Sailor Moon. You’re not mortally injured, you just forgot to eat.”

     You hop down from the barstool and grab a measuring cup with perhaps more ferocity than necessary. While you’re turned to the sink, you get your scowl out by snarling at the drain.

 

     You’re not sure why you’re angry. You don’t get mad if Davesprite points out anything else about your tenuous emotional state – embarrassed, maybe, but no reason to get riled up if he sees you cry at a bad time. When was the last time you’ve eaten? It might have been last night. This morning? Yes, this morning, you remember now. You left a bowl of pears on the counter for the carapacians to pick from, and grabbed one of the smaller ones on your way out the door.

     You only need a few tablespoons, so you hold the measuring cup up to eye level to make sure the water level is right. The silence is heavy behind you – he knows he’s annoyed you. You force your Bec ears to relax.

     It’s weird how hunger manifests itself these days. It comes and goes, fades into a dull ache that eventually dissolves altogether. Most of the time, you can’t tell whether the headaches that wrap around your skull are from hunger, sleeping in too long, or exposure to light. It’s not that you’re doing it on purpose. Skipping meals, you mean. It’s more like your insides are constantly weighed down by this massive, tiring weight that dulls your senses and quiets your body’s complaints. You’re not stupid or lazy or willfully self-destructive. You’ll eat when you’re told. You’ll eat when you’re explicitly reminded. That’s enough, right?

     You think you know why you’re angry now. It’s because you’ve survived this long without the help of other humans – you’ve fed and clothed and housed yourself for nearly a decade – and for the first time your ability to regulate your basic needs is being questioned. Some criticism coming from the boy who lived off of vending machine snacks.

     Jaspers is twisted halfway over under your seats, trying and failing to wash the fur that’s covered up by the collar of his tailcoat. The tip of his princess hat clicks against the floor with each lap.

     “You tell me, Dave. Do I seem _sickly_ to you?” You get back in your seat and fake a ghastly expression, tugging your finger under one of your eyes. “Are my ribs poking out yet?”

     “Been a while since I checked. C’mere.”

     You turn the measuring cup upside down over the bowl after briefly considering pouring it on his head. “Charming.”

     “You think I’m callin’ you dumb, don’t you.”

     Your arm winds around the mixing bowl again. “Not dumb, just careless.”

     Davesprite’s mouth twitches, and he examines the pattern of pumpkin seeds he’s set up in front of him. Then he takes a single seed from the center of a spiral and pops it in his mouth.

     “None of the above,” he says. “I know you can take care of yourself.” Then in one fell swoop, he clasps his hands together and turns the mandala of seeds into one big pile. “Not tryin’ to mom you. It’s just that I don’t have a medical degree, so if you pass out there’s not really anything I can do.”

     “Passing out is not listed in my schedule for today.”

     “You can’t tell me that you’re not hungry at _all_.”

     You stop to assess yourself. Your stomach feels severed from the rest of your body, dull and staticy.

     “Maybe a little.”

     “Then we should probably eat after this.”

     Your lips tighten, and as you stare into the bowl, you think you feel the ghost of a rumble in your gut.

     “I guess so.”

     “Gotta rebuild that food pyramid. Shit’s been crumblin’ for millennia. Many a white dude has tried to plunder the insides and gotten their ass beat by ancient curses.”

     “What constitutes a sound food pyramid?” You start to transfer the contents of the bowl to a tray, and Jaspers pokes his head up to watch you split the dough into balls. “I wasn’t impounded with that kind of information. No public schooling, remember?”

     “Oh man, you got me there. In your case, there’s like, a tiny little sliver of grains at the base, and then the rest is just greens. It’s like someone cropped a forest into a big-ass triangle. Probably needs more alive shit.”

     “Plants are alive.”

     “Shit that’s alive enough to run away when you try to eat it.”

     “Becquerel would have to agree with you on that one.” You look around for the pie tin you got out earlier, then twitch your fingers to zap it in front of you. Jaspers hisses in surprise and disappears under the island. “What’s your food pyramid look like?”

     “First of all, it’s got a moat of a.j. out in front. It’s infested with crocodiles so no one tries to gank my timeless treasure of Doritos. The whole thing crinkles when you walk in it ‘cause it’s full of plastic bags. Then at the tippy top there’s the ultimate prize.”

     “And what’s that?”

     “A golden chest of birdseed.”

     You slap your hand to your mouth to hide your laugh, and you smell the flour that’s coated your skin. Davesprite visibly deflates, assured that you’re no longer mad.

 

 

     In its finished form, your pumpkin pie is a little small. The crimping on its crust is a bit haphazard, and you may have been too liberal with the cinnamon. But it smells amazing, and it’s an effort not to take half of it for yourself. The vividness of your hunger takes you by surprise.

     “So, when’s your Food Network contract comin’ in the mail?” Davesprite asks. You’ve helped him bag the rest of the pumpkin seeds, and he’s already eating handfuls from it. “The name of the show should be a pun, I think. Like, uh… _Hot Dog, Now We’re Cookin’_. Wait, that’s stupid. _Barkin’ Up the Wrong Cheese_? Fuck.”

     “At this rate, you are going to be barred from all future midnight pastry sessions.”

     “You can’t keep me out, I got rights.” He swoops around to your side of the counter and rests his chin on your shoulder. “What’re we eatin’.”

     Behind your eyes, you peruse what’s available in the atrium. “Depends. How long are you willing to wait?”

     Davesprite rolls over in mid-air like an oversized otter. “Doesn’t matter, I just ate half my weight.”

     “Put the seeds away already, would you?” you laugh. You wipe the last of the flour off the counter and prepare to set up your next project. “Give me half an hour. It’s been a while since I’ve made plantains.”

     “I don’t know what the hell those are, but it sounds like pancakes, so I’m in.”

     Under your barstool, Jaspers wakes up from his third nap. First you hear the sound of his hat hitting the bottom of the counter, and then he rears his furry head.

     “Is it ready to eat yet?” he meows. His pink nose twitches at the smell.

     “Yes, but not for you!” you scold. You lift the tin above your head, and Jaspers looks stricken with disappointment. “We have to leave this for Nanna! Even if it’s 0.1% of what she’s already made for us.”

     “I can deliver it to her!” purrs Jaspers. “It’ll only take me a second!”

     “Nice try, kitty.”

     You snap your fingers, and the pie tin teleports itself to Nanna’s bedside table. She’s already asleep under her pile of quilts and crocheted blankets, but it’ll be there for her in the morning.


	40. Chapter 40

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 July, 2010

 

     You’ve been awake for five hours.

     Jade is sighing in her sleep again, curled inward like a dead spider. Sweat sticks to the back of your neck and beads on your feathers. Over and over again, you flop from your stomach to your back in order to air out your wings. Each time you do, Jade’s eyebrows twitch like she’s going to wake up. You exhale loudly into your pillow. It’d be easy to fall back asleep if you wanted to. Start > General > Mode > Idle. You’re not ready to sleep just yet, though. You have too much on your mind.

     Last week, two of the boilers broke, which was then followed by a string of mechanical failures. When the air conditioning stopped working, everyone felt it immediately. Who knew the asscrack between two universes could get so goddamned hot? Carapacians were sweating out in the hallways and on the deck of the battleship – would have been funny if they didn’t look so miserable. The idea of aliens with exoskeletons sweating was ridiculous to you. Jade confined herself to the bowels of the ship, sitting on long wires sprouting from the ceiling to set everything back in order. Standard mechanical operations, she said. Just needed to recalibrate the whatever and reconnect it to the whatchamacallit. Her forehead shone with the heat down there, sleeves rolled up almost to her shoulders, and after a while you had to excuse yourself. When the vents kicked on and cool air came out, an audible cheer could be heard reverberating through the length of the ship.

     But now the AC is shut off, sputtered back into the belly of the beast, and its absence is giving you the heebie jeebies.

     When the rotating fan in your room broke down on day nineteen, you tried to find the owner’s manual so you could fix it. Nothing turned up. When the inside of the fridge stopped lighting up and it no longer sighed cold air on day thirty-one, you did not try to find the owner’s manual. Just as well – you didn’t use it for food, and you’d seen enough PSAs about the dangers of climbing into refrigerators. When the batteries in your handheld fan fizzled out on day forty-six, it took you two hours to alchemize fresh ones. You just lie face-down on your bed, willing the steam to swallow you whole.

     A trickle of sweat runs uncomfortably under the down of your feathers. You stretch your wings out all the way, and their muscles shudder. Under her side of the sheets, Jade’s face contorts, and she draws her hands closer to her face.

           

     You grope for your phone on the nightstand, squinting painfully at the backlighting. It’s 6:34 AM. The early bird gets the worm.

     “Jade?” you whisper. No reaction. “Jade, hey.”

     She makes an unintelligible noise and starts to roll over, so you shake her by the arm. Her eyes blink open, and she must think she’s still dreaming, because she shuts them again right away. You switch tactics and pat her on the face. Jade’s face crumples at this, and this time you can understand what she’s saying.

     “Whatd’youwan?” she murmurs.

     “Wake up.”

     A deep sigh escapes her nostrils. Jade burrows her face halfway into her pillow. “No.”

     “Yes. Wake up.”

     “Whatimeisit.”

     “Like, six, six thirty.”

     Jade groans and hides her face behind her arm. You pry it away and bop her on the cheek again. Her mouth scrunches up at the contact.

     “It’s important, okay. C’mon.”

     Another sigh makes her entire chest rise and fall. Jade rubs the sleep out of her eyes, but when she opens them all the way, they look glazed over anyway.

     “Where’s the fire,” she asks in a weary monotone.

     “Hard to specify. There’s a lot of fire involved with what I’m ‘bout to drop on you.”

     She gives you a confused look. Above you, an early riser is thumping around on the floor. The footsteps echo.

     “What’re you talkin’ about?” asks Jade. She still sounds only half-aware of what’s going on.

     “There’s someplace I want you to go with me, but I need you to promise you won’t freak out.”

     Jade adjusts herself so that she’s flat on her back, squeezing her eyes shut again. “Why would I freak out.”

     “Because I want to go back to my apartment.”

     Jade’s eyes snap to full attention, and she sits up so quickly that the blood rushes to her head. She curses, smacking her hand to her forehead. When her vision settles, she blinks at you with such alarm that you can tell you’ve finally woken her up.

     “Are you serious?” she gasps.

     “No, I forgot about April Fool’s Day until now so I’m making up for it.”

     Jade yanks the ponytail holder out of her hair and runs her hands through her cloud of hair. “Dave, seriously. Are you really sure?”

     You sit up and curl your tail towards you. “Yeah, sure as I’ll ever be. I kinda have to do this on an impulse, you know? If I don’t go now, I’ll change my mind and then never do it at all.”

     She fidgets with the end of her hair, looking a lot less sure of herself without her glasses. “Well… in that case, I’m happy to do it. I just want to make sure it won’t upset you.”

     “Oh, no, it’ll definitely upset me.”

     Her eyes widen in exasperation. “Then why do you want to go?”

     Your mouth twitches. “I don’t.”

     Jade brushes her bangs out of her face and looks at you. When you don’t say anything else, she sighs in resignation and feels around for her glasses. She slides them onto her face, ears twitching nervously, and then she takes your hand.

     “Are you _sure_?”

     “Yes, I’m sure.”

     She nods, looking at the sheets with only half-concealed doubt. “Ready?”

     You squeeze her hand. “Ready.”

 

     Teleportation clenches its fists around your cells and steamrolls the air out of you. When the electric chill leaves you, it’s replaced by an absolutely crushing wave of _heat_. The Land of Heat and Clockwork has chugged along in your absence, grinding and burping with its cumbersome and incandescent weight. For a moment you can’t even take in your surroundings – you gasp with the heat that sticks to your skin, and Jade reaches out to support your arm.

     This version of your apartment has been built up to the stratosphere, spindles of iron and brick reaching their hands upward. Though no walls surround you, you still feel cornered. You stand at the top of a staircase that winds down to the entrance of your apartment proper, and from this height you can see bubbles of lava hiccupping at the surface of LOHAC’s red sea. The vision of them is smudged at the edges, like a faraway car in a mirage. Everything is so _loud_ , everything is so _hot_. You want to leave. You _need_ to leave.

     Your regret makes you nauseous. Panic seizes you, and for a horrible second you feel certain you’re going to throw up, or collapse from heat stroke, or both. You waver in place, and Jade holds your arms tighter. She’s asking if you’re okay, but her voice is drowned out by the churning of LOHAC’s mechanical insides.

     You tug on her arm, leading her down the narrow concrete stairs. “Come on.”

 

     Jade trails closely behind you, your intertwined hands clammy with sweat. She doesn’t say anything as you wind down the floors of the tower, but her fingers twitch uncontrollably, tensed up on your behalf. The weight of your planet’s temperature becomes more oppressive as you travel downward. You draw your wings tight against your back so they don’t scrape the metal infrastructure.

     Each time you descend a level, you think you’ve made it to the bottom. But then the doors creak open and all that’s there is an empty box, clean white walls and windows beaded with condensation. It feels like all your neighbors have moved out, leaving you the last resident for light years. There’s claw marks in the floor from where underlings have slithered through the tower, scorched patches where lava has been leaked in from outside. Squatters.

     When Jade’s glasses steam up with heat and she has to tuck them into the front of her shirt, you reach the roof of your apartment. The air conditioner has been dead for months, dust collecting inside of its massive blades. There’s still game equipment up here, trails of footprints in the gravel from whatever shenanigans Dave was getting up to. You coast over the ledge to the main entrance, but Jade has to hop down so she doesn’t trip. The door to the stairwell is stuck. You let go of Jade’s hand to wrench it open, and the hinges produce a horrible, rusted whine.

     You stare into the dark.

     “Well,” you sigh. “Made it this far.”

     Jade sticks close, peering into the dark. Then she nods in agreement, and you start the descent towards your apartment.

     A sour smell lingers towards the bottom of the stairs. It’s like expired food and body odor got all congealed inside a blender and left in the sun. Your nostrils flare, sickened, and Jade makes an involuntary growl of disgust in the back of her throat. At the bottom of the stairwell is the door to the living room. If you tried to keep going down the stairs, they’d dump you into the magma where your downstairs neighbors used to live. The white paint has become scratched and faded over the years, mostly from when your rooftop sparring followed you back into the apartment. A few times, your bro had to sand down the wood to hide the marks his swords had made. Wouldn’t want the landlord to see.

     The metal doorknob is hot in your hand, and you swing it open before it can burn the skin off your palm. The lights have died in Dave’s absence, and the inside of the apartment is a murky gray from where you stand.

     Slowly, slowly, you inch across the threshold, and then you’re back home.

 

     The stench isn’t any better. It’s curdled and sweaty, all of your brother’s possessions sweating like organic things. It takes a second for the gravity of the place to sink in – you feel like you’re standing in a diorama, a freakishly accurate Madame Tussaud version of your childhood home. Your wing brushes the metal of the fridge, no longer cool now that the electricity’s gone out. The contact startles you, and you almost yelp when you’ve convinced yourself a puppet has come to life as a horrendous booby trap.

     Jade notices the feathers puff up along your wings, and her hand hovers over your shoulder for fear of startling you again. She gives you that silent _Are you sure you’re not about to barf?_ face, and you swallow the bile rising in your throat.

     “Welcome to the house,” you rasp.

     Her eyes dart to the floor, embarrassed. You remember how she was so determined to curtain off whole swaths of her home to you – maybe she’s waiting for explicit permission to gaze across the apartment. You can’t blame her; it’s a lot of effort for you to take it all in, too.

     “Hey,” you murmur. “Do you mind hanging tight for a second?”

     She shakes her head.

     You coax Jade out from behind you, encouraging her into the cramped kitchen. She shuffles to stand in front of the stove, timid, and she squeaks when her back pokes an errant shuriken that’s been left on the counter. She wrings her hands, looking like a kid in an antique store who’s been told she’ll be whacked upside the head if she touches anything.

     The apartment is silent, underlined with the rumbling of the magma not far below. As it did in your own timeline, the glowing planet doesn’t do much to illuminate the inside. Strong pops of color make grabby hands for your attention, jagged patterns and designs bursting forth from your brother’s posters. The heat has made them melt off of the walls. More than half of them are unstuck in their corners, slumping off the plaster. A poster of some abominable snowman ventriloquist dummy is making a desperate bid to leap from the wall altogether, and you can see why your bro taped it up where he did – it was to hide the puncture wounds of ninja stars. You remember now. The noise complaints of neighbors made him tone down the violence of his pranks for a while.

     A spring in the futon creaks. The sound of it tears you. The couch always tended to creak – the damn thing sounded like a whining toddler whenever you sat on it to play video games, its net of wires squalling at each shift of your legs. There’s a split second where you’re convinced that everything is somehow normal, that maybe your brother is rolling over in his sleep and you just can’t see him. But then it’s extinguished with the second association you have with this futon: a favorite nesting spot of Calsprite when he wasn’t flapping his wings up in the crawlspace. Sometimes at night you could hear him hee-hoo-haaing underneath it, and in the morning there’d be a fresh pile of feathers and torn-up bits of puppets. You didn’t want to think about how he managed to tear them up.

     Dust has collected on your brother’s desktop. The monitor button has gone black, so you know it’s dead. You wiggle the mouse anyway, but nothing happens. Peering under the table tells you that something – some sort of underling – has chewed at the cables. Whoever the culprit was also made a mess of the GameBros scattered across the desk. Bits of paper are gnawed off at the ends, and one issue is flipped open to a full spread ad for Olive Garden, two skaters shredding across the dinner table while stuffing their faces with breadsticks. _When you’re here, you’re fam._

     Even if Jade was gone, you would still feel you’re not the only one here. Shadows play in your periphery, tricks of the light that you’ve trained yourself to see as _him_. As long as you’re here, there is no sword through the chest, there is no red and gold seeping together in the azure soil, and there is no sprite pendant left in the mess of his blood. Every private moment of contemplation you’ve had about this life, about this apartment, has been for nothing. As far as your subconscious is concerned, your brother is alive, and you are helpless as ever, and he is waiting for you still.

     Jesus Christ, there was nothing normal about this apartment, was there.

     The door to the hallway is ajar. A sliver of black pokes out, the scratch marks still etching the bottom from when you accidentally closed the door and locked a crow in the living room. The wood is slick with heat, and your talons hiss against it as you push it open.

     The hallway is very dark and very empty. Two doors stand across from each other at the end – the bathroom and your bedroom. Dread lodges in your throat, and although anything could be waiting for you in your bedroom, you keep creeping forward anyway. Your tail skims the worn-down carpet, too tread by sneakers to ever be considered “plush” again. Wait – your room? Is it your room? Did it stop being yours once you took a bow and excused yourself from the alpha timeline?

     What a stupid question. Of course it’s your room. You slept in that bed all your life, dammit, and you’ll spread your wings out in there if you damn well please. The only concern is whether some cartoonish trap is going to snap you up once you enter.

     The temperature rises against your hand as you go to push your bedroom door open. You must’ve – _Dave_ , must’ve – left the window open. Figures. The weight of your heart threatens to push out against your lungs and force all the air out, and it takes you a while to finally open the door. You count down from five, then from ten, then from ten again. Anything could be waiting behind that thing. An aerial barrage of bulbous puppets, that terrible cackling hee-hawing nightmare-sprite, _him_. Your skin steels itself for assault, every muscle locking up. You squeeze your eyes shut, and then you push the door wide open.

 

     You blink at the toilet sitting in the middle of your room for what feels like forever before you recognize what it is and bust out laughing. You double over, holding your aching sides, and in seconds you’re using the top of the toilet as support so you don’t fall over. The sound of your crowing echoes in the room – must sound creepy from the kitchen. You wipe away the tears that streak your face, the muscles in your face screaming.

     “Jade!” you call. “Come over here.”

     There’s a pause before you hear you footsteps treading down the hall, like she thinks you’ll change your mind and banish her back into the main room. She pokes her head around the corner, and when her eyes lock on what you’ve been laughing so hard about, she gasps aloud. Her mouth forms a little O.

     “The toilet!” she yelps.

     “The _toilet_ ,” you rasp. Your voice is sanded down without the air that laughing took from you. “Man, I forgot all _about_ this shit.”

     Jade is hiding her face behind her hands, fingers slid up underneath her glasses. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

     “Nah, dude, this is fucking hilarious. It’s got me tickled pink thinkin’ that Dave had to put up with this on top of everything else, like sleeping on the floor and letting me do all the hard work for him.”

     “How could you forget living with that for so long?”

     “It started cramping my style pretty quick. After, like, a week, I hauled it back to the bathroom and dropped it into the hole in the ground. Always looked wonky after that, but at least there was more room to move around. Jumping over the seat on the way to the computer was annoying as hell.” You scratch your jaw. “God, this is like forgetting to save a document, y’know? And you open it up again and you’re changes aren’t there. Really didn’t expect to see this thing.”

     You coast around the misplaced fixture and sit yourself on the bedsheets. They almost feel damp with the heat pouring in from the window, and a sharp shiver twitches through your entire body. The pattern of hearts and spades gets crumpled in your claws as you clench them between your fingers.

     “You can come in, by the way. If you want.”

     Jade starts, and you realize she hadn’t expected to be invited in. She takes a tiny step into the room, and you have you relax your posture and lean with your elbows on your tail before she’ll walk fully inside. She still looks unsure of herself, and she disappears briefly behind the toilet before reappearing at the window. Jade peers out over the lava sea with such intensity that you’re almost convinced something is out there.

     “It looks different without the equipment,” she says after a while. She’s still looking out the window.

     You don’t know what she means at first, but then you realize – over the months, she’s teleported this room bare of its DJing gear. The tangle of cables snaking across your floor have vanished, tables left propping up nothing. Without anything on top of them, the cinderblocks in your room just look like someone left a construction project half-finished.

     “Oh. Yeah.” You scratch the back of your head. “Still kind of a mess, though. Sorry.”

     Jade looks down, running her finger on a dark spot of your desk. It’s a brown splotch of blood, irreparably stained into the wood of the 2x4s. Your first instinct is to assume it’s your own, but then Jade corrects you.

     “Sorry about prototyping the crow, too,” she says. “I wasn’t myself when I was dreaming. I made a lot of stupid mistakes.” She takes her hand away from the desk, plucking out a splinter that’s settled into her fingertip. You decide to accept the apology, even though you don’t think the blood came from that old impaled corvid.

     “Meh. Coulda been a lot worse, in my opinion. Like, what else was I gonna prototype it with? The snazziest DJ gear in the room? I’d look the exact same, except I could literally only speak in raps.” You pause, rubbing your chin. “You know what? That would’ve been sick. Thanks for stripping away my destiny as the best in both games.”

     Jade laughs under her breath and leans against the desk. “If you spoke in all raps, I’d force you to learn sign language.”

     “Everyone’s a critic.” You shrug. “But seriously, it’s like poetic fate that that feathery asshole ended up in the kernel. You were just a vessel for Skaia to fulfill its fucked up whims.”

     “Why exactly is being spliced with a bird ‘poetic,’ other than the possible allusions to Poe?”

     You look at the ceiling. “I dunno. Maybe it was ‘cause I always had the window open, but these crows would always be in my fuckin’ room. Even on Derse, sometimes their projections would show up, peckin’ at my dream sheets and shedding on the fancy carpet. It’s like, if you love the concept of being a public nuisance so much, why don’t you marry it.”

     Outside, a rusted gear spills a waterfall of lava back into the sea. Rinse and repeat.

     “It was kinda convenient sometimes, though. I stopped setting an alarm some days because one of the bastards would always be cawing right in my ear. Never had any idea what they wanted from me. God knows I wasn’t gonna encourage them by feedin’ them.” You run your hands over each other, feeling the rough skin where your joints become inhuman in their sharpness. “I used to dream about them a lot, before the game started. Swarms of them, so many that you couldn’t even see the sky. If I wasn’t so damn reasonable all the time, I might’ve thought I was marked for death. Or, you know. Marked for Animorphing into a bird.”

     Jade’s mouth curves into a private smile. You tilt your head.

     “What. Are you havin’ a giggle about my furry fate.”

     She shakes her head. “No. It’s just that you said crows would congregate in here?”

     “Yeah, like it was Easter Sunday and they heard I was givin’ out my world famous pot roast.”

     Jade reaches out and traces her finger around the lens of a camera that’s lying on a stack of blank Polaroids. “Crows are very smart.”

     “I know. I was pretty much already a genius, but now I feel like I’m really on that Einstein level.”

     “Let me finish! I mean, a lot of animals can sense if you’re a good or kind person. So I feel that if you weren’t feeding them, then they probably hung out here because they knew they could trust you.”

     You bite the inside of your mouth. “Some good that instinct turned out to be. The whole reason I got wings is because they thought I was safe to be around.”

     Jade stretches her arms out in front of her and edges around the toilet to your bookshelf. Most of the breakables have survived the quaking of transitioning to the Medium. She pushes her glasses up her nose, leaning in to examine the specimens in their jars.

     “I wouldn’t say that,” she muses. “Now that bird gets to see what being a person is like.” She turns and smiles at you. “And vice versa.”

     “I think you’re the only one who sees cultural exchange as decent payback for getting gored.”

     “Forgiveness comes in many forms, Dave.”

     Jade taps a jar that’s gone murky with time. Since you haven’t stuck around to change the fluids, most of the dead shit in these containers can barely be seen _._ A pincer appears out of the dirty chemical-soup, and you recognize it as a scorpion. This one wasn’t bought from a shady medical site like the rest – you found this one in a shrub on the way back from school. Already dead, obviously. You didn’t have a death wish.

 _“ _Centruroides vittatus__ ,” Jade murmurs, mostly to herself. She raises her eyes to look at the shelf above it, and points out a shell. “Ah, and _Nautilus belauensis_! I always hoped one would turn up at home, but their habitat was too far away.” She turns to smile at you, and excitement makes her face light up.

     “If I knew you were doing this, I could have sent you something,” she says. “A lot of weird things would sometimes wash up in the tidal pools. Starfish with half-missing arms, all kinds of eels, sometimes sea snakes. All with absolutely _wild_ colors, too.” Jade clasps her hands behind her back, staring fondly at the jars. “They would have looked nice here.”

     This comes as a surprise. You expected her to think them morbid, a disgusting hobby making entertainment of some poor animal’s death. It wasn’t like you really felt the need to share, anyway – as far as your projects went, hoarding dead shit was the least likely to garner attention, so why bother mentioning it?

     You weren’t sure why you kept them like this. It was less gross curiosity, more genuine fascination. You liked spotting fossils in people’s sidewalks, ancient spiraling shells lodged in the concrete. And as a wee tyke, you secretly coveted that kind of oatmeal with the dinosaur eggs. Rose might have taken this interest too figuratively, writing away in her legal pad that, like the remains of lifeforms long dead, you were _seeking to decode the mysteries of a past whose deeper meaning continues to allude you_. But it wasn’t that deep – you just thought that shit was awesome. For some unexplainable reason, you feel an acid bubble of guilt floating inside your gut, ready to pop.

     Man, you could have really had your own interests.

     You hang your head and sigh heavily through your nostrils. There’s the glassy click of Jade setting down a specimen, and then you hear her feet shuffling nervously.

     “Are you all right?” she asks.

     You shrug.

     “Do you want me to leave?”

     Slowly, you shake your head and pat the spot on the bed next to you. Jade squeezes past equipment and bathroom appliances to reach you, then seats herself tentatively on the sheets. Her fingers lace together on her lap.

     “I had no idea what I was doing the whole time I lived here,” you say. You run your claws through your hair. “Not that you’re supposed to have your life mapped out in front of you when you’re thirteen. But I felt like, as long as I was here, I wasn’t… moving forward?”

     Out of the corner of your eye, you see Jade tilt her head. She’s too polite to ask you to clarify.

     “I don’t know. Like, you can’t just take a kid and keep tellin’ him that two plus two equals four over and over for thirteen years, then throw him out into the world and start askin’ him what log roots and long division are. Kid’s gonna shit his pants before he can even lift the chalk.”

     LOHAC is still roaring outside the window. You nudge Jade in the arm and point to it, and in the next second the glass pane slides itself closed. The noise is dulled, but you still feel just as hot.

     “Like as long as I lived here, I was always gonna be pinned underfoot by… well, y’know. Whatever.”

     You don’t expect a response, nor do you really want one. Jade has never been the best when it comes to comforting people, and you’re not the best when it comes to receiving it. So when she leans forward and plucks a Polaroid off the floor, you’re content to be distracted.

     She flips it over, and what’s on the other side is one of your most cringeworthy selfies ever taken. You’re crouching on the bathroom sink, one foot on each side as you snap a pic in front of the mirror. The entire composition is off – only part of your other arm is visible, and the whole thing is a little motion-blurred from how you were wobbling in place. You distinctly remember being afraid that the whole sink was gonna come detached from the wall. A wave of revulsion passes through you, but Jade is already howling with laughter.

     “Did you take this _ironically_?” she asks.

     “No, I can assure you that was in earnest. Sometimes you gotta show off the whole outfit, and there were no full-length mirrors at the ready.”

     “Yeah, right.” Jade wipes a tear from her eye. You can’t help from laughing yourself, just for her reaction if not for the picture itself. The sound in here is more _real_ now that it’s not escaping out the window, and you feel suddenly grounded. This is real. This is happening. You are in your room, and nothing is scrambling out of the closet to bite your fingers off, and no traps await you, because your girlfriend is here and she can see every inch of _space_ , goddammit. Nothing is going to hurt you.

     Relief washes over you. You start to sit up from the bed, and Jade looks up at you with the Polaroid still between her fingers.

     “We can leave soon,” you promise. “I just want to check out one more thing.”

 

 

     The cord to the crawlspace is shivering from the tremors crawling up the tower. The ring to a metal keychain is tied to the end, and it reflects every dot of light that manages to strike it. You float in the middle of the kitchen, staring up at the narrow opening. _Hello Dave_.

     You grasp the end of the cord, bracing yourself for whatever cloud of puppet parts and underling shit might fall out. It hums with tension, the door on the ceiling starting to come away.

     “Wait here,” you mutter. Jade nods from the spot she’s cleared off on the kitchen counter.

     Then you hold your breath, your knuckles paling, and you pull it all the way open.

     Nothing comes out. The opening to the crawlspace is black, and the panel to the ceiling creaks back and forth. The note your brother pasted to it finally falls off, drifting to the floor until it lands face-down. You tuck your wings tightly against you as you drift up to the ceiling, but it still takes a bit of wriggling to get yourself fully inside the crawlspace. You blink, adjusting to the pitch.

     A column of gray light from the kitchen shines up and illuminates the middle of the space. There’s the smell of wood fibers, a thin trace of dust, but otherwise there’s an alarming sense of cleanliness. Your eyes become accustomed to the dark, and as you look around, something white catches your attention.

     It’s a fucking mattress.

     Your eyebrows furrow. This has got to be a joke – how the fuck does someone get a fucking mattress up here without busting the ceiling open? But it’s here, and it’s right in front of you. Like your own bed, the mattress is simply lying on the ground. The sheets are clean, folded neatly and tucked into the sides. It doesn’t even look like it’s been slept in.

     You feel your teeth bare as you give the rest of the place an incredulous stare. Your brother has installed more hooks into the paneling, and across them lay a dozen more shitty anime swords. Most of them you don’t recognize. Every rack is filled, none of them out of place.

     This wasn’t just a stealthy hidey-hole that your brother used to torment you throughout the apartment. This was his fucking bedroom, and if you neglected the swords on the wall, it’s upsettingly average.

     “What the fuck…?” you murmur.

     What disturbs you is not the fact that your brother was sleeping in the ceiling. For a seemingly nocturnal creature, it actually seems appropriate. What gets under your skin, though, is how normal everything is. There’s not a poster on the wall, not even a single colorful puppet limb jutting out from somewhere it shouldn’t. There’s a crate of manila folders near your tail, and when you bend down to read them, you can see that they’re just financial. Records of online transactions made to his websites, domain ownership titles, even a chronological folder of every rent payment he’s ever made. It’s bizarre seeing his handwriting used for something that isn’t a shady comic or a thinly-veiled threat. Seeing this makes you whip your head back and forth, looking frantically for some other proof that this was really his space, but no other personal marker remains. No pictures, no folded clothes, no nothing. The only other thing in the room is sitting in the back corner – a single clothing iron, its cord wrapped around its handle.

     What the hell does this mean? If your brother was capable of being, you don’t know, an _adult_ , then how the fuck are you supposed to explain the manchild mess he left down there? Did he do it just to mess with you, did he do it to seem “cool?” No, you think not – no one’s off their rocker enough to commit to his lifestyle without meaning it sincerely. If your brother was _truly_ as incompetent in the realms of parenting and housekeeping as he seemed, maybe you could have found it in your heart to forgive him posthumously. _Like, no problem dude, what guy in your mindset could be expected to raise an infant_? But that wasn’t the case, was it. He was always capable of being mature, he just didn’t choose to be when it counted.

     The slanted ceiling seems tighter than before, and there’s a flash of fear that they’ll close in on you if you stay in here any longer. A strained puff of air leaves you, and before you know what you’re doing, you’re yanking the sheet off of your brother’s bed. It comes off with a sharp whisper, and you have to tug on it to make it let go of the mattress. You mash the sheets up in a ball under your arm, and when you squeeze your way back into the kitchen, the edges of them catch on the ceiling. You pull down on it hard, and it makes a ripping noise before it all falls after you. The ends of the sheets droop to the floor.

     You take two ends of the sheet and spread it out in the middle of the floor. It looks all crumpled now, a smell of dust rising up from it. There’s a roar from down below as a tower of fire spits up from the lava. You stare at the floor, a million thoughts fighting for your attention, and then you start to take down all your brother’s shit.

 

     “What are you doing?” Jade asks. Her voice is tinged with that tone she takes on when she thinks you’ve gone nuts but doesn’t want to tell you. You tear across the living room wall, ripping hideous posters down and slapping them all together. In a few spots, the tape peels off patches of paint.

     “Spring cleaning.”

     “It’s July, though! I think….”

     “Summer cleaning.”

     This is the most cleaning you’ve ever done in your life. You dump the posters in a crinkled pile on the floor, then go about yanking down all the puppets. Two of them are halfway jammed under the entertainment center, and the whole thing makes a concerning groan when you yank their disproportionate heads out from it. The strings of ventriloquist dummies bend and break when you snatch them from the ceiling, and their wooden limbs clatter together as they hit the growing pile. Then you start getting indiscriminate. A dozen hats, into the pile. Every magazine in your line of sight, into the pile. Not even the firecrackers in the sink are spared, even though you’re pretty sure you bought a few of them with your own money. When it becomes obvious that the bedsheet isn’t going to hold them all, you stand panting over the chaos and turn to Jade.

     “Make it bigger,” you say flatly.

     She blinks, opening her mouth like she’s going to say something, but then she closes it again and nods. The bedsheet snaps, crackles, and pops green, nearly doubling in size, and you clench your jaw.

     “Better.”

     You look past her and grab the eyesore of knives and throwing stars from the counter. Their blades poke into your arms, but you don’t do anything about it. They clink together, sliding off of slick GameBro covers and tangling in the tufty hair of pastel puppets. Then you turn your attention to the far wall, fixing your eyes on the katanas your brother left behind. Jade follows your line of sight, and full-fledged concern reveals itself on her face.

     “You can’t put the swords in there, it’ll rip!” she protests.

     You shake your head. “No, I’m keeping those. I’m taking it upon myself to inherit them.”

     Her raised eyebrows disappear into her hair, and she watches helplessly as you finish your whirlwind through the apartment. The bathroom is bare after you clear it of its population of puppets, and you narrowly avoid dropping one of them down the hole where the toilet used to be. When you look around the apartment and nothing more catches your eye as something to chuck away, it strikes you how white the walls are. It looks boring. It looks normal. It looks… livable.

     You start to tie the ends of the sheets together, and a few wily smuppets escape before it’s fully wrapped up. The entire thing is a complete mess – pointed tips of weapons threaten to tear through the fabric, and it makes a great crinkling shuffle from within as the contents settle around each other. A big lumpy egg, nothing able to hatch from it except maybe teen angst. Sweat sticks to your face, partially from the heat but also because you’re so worn out. You kneel with your hands grasping the finished product, panting with the effort it takes to figure out what comes next.

     “I had a lot of time to think about you after you left,” you murmur.

     Jade shifts nervously from one foot to the other, fully aware that you aren’t speaking to her.

     “I don’t know what I thought finding you would accomplish. I guess there was always a part of me that was so miserably lacking in confidence that I thought you would know how to help. As if having you back here would make this cesspool planet any less horrendous. As if you wouldn’t team up with Calsprite to make the last days of that timeline a living hell.” You wipe the sweat from your forehead, and it shines on the skin of your arm. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder and all that shit.

     “I just don’t understand _why_. I wish you could tell me, but god knows you wouldn’t even bother with a serious answer. You’d just come back as a Force ghost or something and be like, ‘ _idk it was funny lmao_.’ I just don’t fucking get it. Like, why did you ditch me, dude? Did you think it’d make me a better person? Because y’know, it really didn’t. It just made me a half-human disgrace of a sad sack, and maybe if you stuck around to help me, I woulda reversed the timeline not feeling so shit about everything.

     “And like, what was I supposed to say when you saw me again? Give you shit for something you didn’t even remember doing?” The back of your throat stings, and you feel a sharpness behind your eyes. “But everything was fine, y’know, because you didn’t treat me any different. I think you were the only one who saw me and the alpha me as having equal value. We were both just as relevant to you if we could still hold a sword. Didn’t matter that I was orange had no legs and was sproutin’ feathers in places they have no business being. As long as I could swing a sword around, I still mattered to you.

     “At the end of the day, I guess I fucking hated you. And I’m sure it was mutual. No one with your mental age wants to deal with a snot-nosed little kid messing up their good time. God _damn_ , just….” You hang your head, and for the first time you’re conscious of the fact that you’re crying. They’re hot tears, tickling your cheeks and running off your chin. You don’t raise a hand to wipe them away.

     “What kind of person makes a joke out of raising a fucking child,” you say after a while. Your sight is blurred with your film of tears, and you blink a few times to regain your vision.

     After sniffing loudly, you realize that Jade is still lingering off to the side. She looks completely at a loss for what to do, stuck between retreating into the shadows and joining you on the floor. You clear your throat and will your voice not to tremble.

     “I guess Dave is gonna be pissed that I trashed the place, but I can honestly say I don’t give a fuck.” You force a laugh, but it’s not very convincing. You pick the bedsheets up by the knot they’ve been tied into, and you turn to request Jade’s assistance once again.

     “Help me.”

 

     It’s heavier than you thought it’d be. Jade grimaces as she helps you pick it up, probably from the needle-sharp tips of ninja stars that might be poking into her forearms. Your skin overlaps, stuck together with sweat as you lead the two of you over to the living room window. The window is still cracked open. You pause, panting, and let half the load rest on the ledge of the entertainment center. Jade already knows what you’re planning to do with it, but the look on her face suggests she’s hoping you’ll change your mind. But you don’t – gotta do something now, or that zit of repressed rage is gonna burst someplace else.

     “All right,” you gasp. “Heave-ho.”

     The contents of the sheet screams with protest as you start to shove it out the window. Metal and fabric and wood scrapes against the paneling, almost swallowed in the grumbles of the lava outside. Jade bares her teeth, leans against the brunt of it with the back of her shoulder. At first it seems like it might be stuck, but then it gives way, and you both thunk against windowsill as it all tumbles down the side of the tower. Twice it hits the metal scrape, then continues its backflip and lands without a sound into the lava. Fire laps it up, white fabric scorching black, and in seconds it’s swallowed in the sea.

     Jade’s hand touches your shoulder lightly, her hair grazing your skin, but you hardly feel it. You just lean out the window and stare down at the spot where it once was, completely unsure whether or not you’ll live to regret this decision.

 

 

     The futon squishes with resignation underneath you, too battered with use and heavy with humidity to put up a fight. You don’t just sit, you collapse – your wings stretch out, and you become fully conscious of how utterly exhausted you are. The old ghostly sensation of dehydration itches in the base of your throat. You close your eyes.

     The other cushion squeaks quietly. Jade kneels cautiously beside you, her hands resting on her legs. She’s closed the window behind you, and the sound of the planet is muffled.

     “Do you feel better?” she asks.

     “I feel… something.”

     You hang the back of your head over the edge of the futon. Every little motion seems to echo now that nothing is being choked by gaudy eighties designs and polyester ass.

     “When I started going to school,” you start, “I started to recognize what ‘normal’ was supposed to be. It seemed like such an alien concept to me, and maybe part of me was proud that we were different. But so much of it seemed so awesome, y’know? Like, _damn_ Billy, you’re tellin’ me you don’t have to hide the food you bring home in the back of your closet? Your mom _feeds_ you? Get outta town.

     “I thought a lot about how my life might be better if I could hang out with you guys in real life. Like if I could just fuck off for a weekend and sleep at someone else’s house.” You pinch the bridge of your nose. “I guess I got that wish fulfilled eventually, in the most ironic fucking way possible. I don’t know. I thought that maybe it would make my bro act less weird, too, if I regularly had friends over. Like he’d be forced to become self-aware and realize that he was being obnoxious.”

     “Yeah, I think Rose would have psychoanalyzed him into a new state of mind.”

     You laugh a little, swiping your hand down your face. Jade seems relieved that she’s made you smile. With your arm propped up on the cushion, you rest your face against your fist and turn to look at her.

     “When I was tellin’ you about the stuff I would have done with you if you were here –”

     “Gosh, that was such a long time ago….”

     “I know. But I left some stuff out.” You feel your face go warmer. You adjust yourself so that you’re facing her, and you take her face in her hands. “I would have been so different if I could’ve grown up with you. I just had to have my life ruined to finally get that chance.”

     Jade looks at you quietly, a soft sadness settling into her face, and she rests one of her hands on top of yours.

     Holy fucking shit, you are so lucky not to be alone.

     You burst into laughter, your hands dropping from her face to clutch your sides, and Jade’s face crumples into worry.

     “What? What is it? Did I do something?”

     “No… it’s just….” You gasp aloud. “I can’t believe this. It’s almost been a year….”

     “What are you talking about?”

     You wipe a tear from your eye. “Jade. I’m so fucking sorry. I can’t believe I haven’t said it.”

     “Said _what_?”

     The laughter leaves you, and you clasp her hands between yours. Both your hands are clammy as hell.

     “I love you. Like, an unreal amount.” Jade’s face stains dark red, and she starts to stutter, so you fill the awkward silence. “And I know we’re livin’ on borrowed time, and there’s every chance we might not even wake up tomorrow. But I still don’t know how I can thank… Skaia, or the fucked up octopus gods, or whatever for the time I’ve already got to spend with you. The timeline can go fuck itself for all I care – it matters to me that we can just… hang out like this.” Jade looks down at her knees, quivering with nerves. “I know this past year has been a total wreck. I know we only have the same old shit to slog through ahead of us. But I’m glad I’m not alone.”

     Jade turns her face to mask it with the curtain of her hair, but not quickly enough to hide that she’s started crying. Her hand flies to cover her eyes, and you just barely see her mouth crimp into a tight frown. You feel sick, suddenly convinced that you’ve come on too strong and that you should’ve swallowed the last two minutes of conversation. You take her hands away from her face, and she allows you to kiss the corners of her eyes. Jade is still swallowing her tears as you edge yourself against her, leaning in to trace your lips against every conceivable part of her face. It’s salty with sweat, but your tolerance for Gross Shit has skyrocketed so high that you don’t even care. Then you lean in too far, a little too determined to lift her spirits, and Jade squeaks with surprise as she loses her posture and falls backward. She slaps her hand to her eyes, tittering with embarrassed laughter.

     “Sorry,” she laughs. “That’s probably not the reaction you expected. I’m actually… it’s happy crying, if you can believe it.”

     You’re stunned. Jade locks her knees together, her hair falling off the edge of the cushion. With one arm, she reaches down and grazes a finger across a grey spot in the carpet.

     “I’ve thought a lot about what I would do if… it hadn’t just been… him. If I had lost both you and John.”

     It’s the first time in a while you’ve heard her say his name out loud. It hangs in the air.

     “When I think about it… it’s just horrible. I don’t know what I would’ve done. It’s frightening, thinking about what I would be like. I don’t think there would be any saving me from how low I would have gotten." Jade stares at a point beyond you. "I know I’ve always told you that I wasn’t built to be around people, or that I don’t know what to do with human contact. But I don’t think that was ever true. I wasn’t meant to sequester myself away. It just took a lot of time to realize that, and I’m so thankful that you’re here. I wish that we could be happier, and that things weren’t such a mess, and that I had been more careful so that this wouldn’t have happened.”

     Her tears seem sadder now, glazing over her eyes and streaking her glasses, and you lean over to kiss the edge of her mouth. She reciprocates, returning the almost desperate pressure you put into it. You pull away, and she lifts her arm to rest it on the futon and take your upper arm lightly in her hand.

     “Thank you for being patient, and for riding this out with me. I love you, too.”

     Your lungs deflate with the force of your relief. She pulls you down to kiss you again, unbuckling her knees so they don’t prod into your tail. You press yourself flush to her, your talons twisting into the curls of her hair. You’re not gonna lie – it’s so hot in this fucking apartment that being this close to each other heightens your discomfort, but you don’t let even a whisper of air slip between you. When the heat gets to you, you move your lips to the crook of her neck, and Jade’s spine arches involuntarily.

     “Wait,” you murmur. You pull away and look her in the face. “Is it me, or did this place stop reeking?”

     She pauses, glancing off to the side. “I think we just got used to it,” she answers.

     You sit upright. “Maybe we should go to your place.”

     “I’m okay with that plan.”

     Jade nudges the end of your tail with her foot, then reaches her hand out to take it in yours. A spark of the Green Sun fizzles between your fingers, and then your cells are lighting up chartreuse once again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> willfully writing strider manpain (tm) made me barren


	41. Chapter 41

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 08 October, 2010

 

     With your face against the pillow, you can still hear the grumbling of the boilers underneath the floor. It blends with the blood rushing against your ear. You squeeze the pillow tighter in your arms.

     Davesprite’s claws are tap-tap-tapping away at his keyboard. He pauses, makes a noise of disapproval, and then smashes the backspace key several times. As you drift in and out of consciousness, the sound of the keys leaks into your half-dreams. It takes the form of rain against the atrium window, marbles that a Prospitian child tosses across the cobblestones, and then it’s just computer keys again.

     Today is indistinguishable from the previous. You’re not even sure if it’s “tomorrow” yet – you haven’t checked the time since you first woke up.

  


     From under the covers, you nudge Davesprite’s tail with your toe. You don’t turn to look at him, since without your glasses, the finer details would be lost anyway.

     “What’re you doing,” you murmur.

     He grunts and reaches out to hold your ankle. “It’ll make you sad.”

     “I’m already sad.”

     Davesprite sighs so hard that his shoulders rise and fall.

     “Sometimes there are these moments where I really have something to say to John. Sometimes Rose, too, but mostly… there’s a lot of things I’d like to talk to him about.”

     “Like what?”

     “Just… some of the stuff we do on the ship. Random memories I get from when we were younger. Old jokes. Things that happen to us that remind me of his stupid movies. Stuff like that. So when I want to talk, I type it out here.”

     “Read me some of it?”

     He lets go of your leg, and there’s the sound of him scrolling around. Davesprite clears his throat.

     “Couple days ago, your grandma learned how to use a search engine and immediately got herself hooked on wartime radio archives.” He reads quickly and flatly, spitting it all out at once. “Not shitting you when I say that we were sitting in the kitchen for half the night listening to Sir Berwick-upon-Fisting crack nasally one-liners about the Germans. Like, we _could not_ leave, she had Jade’s laptop held hostage. All we needed was a fireplace and a few good pairs of Sunday shoes to make the whole damn picture complete. And like, I think she genuinely wanted to spend time with us, but sometimes it’s really hard to tell whether we’re helping her relive her old life. Before you say anything, no, dude, I don’t think your grandma is a senile old coot who calls us ‘dear’ just ‘cause she can’t remember our names. But when she closes her eyes that much and for so long, I can’t help thinkin’ that she’d prefer if we were you and your dad instead. No offense taken. I just thought I’d mention that she still really wishes you were here, even if she doesn’t say anything about it.”

 

     His judgment was correct – this does make you sad.

     Neither of you ever _really_ stop thinking about John. The gravity of his ghost follows you around, always perching quietly in the back of your minds. Over time, you have forgotten what it’s like to not be at least a little nauseous with nerves. There’s something worse than all of this, though, and it sours your stomach with shame. It’s that your brother’s face is starting to lose its features one by one in your memory, and just like your grandfather before him, the sound of his voice is hard to conjure. Did he have the freckles on his face since you were dreaming children, or did you only notice them once the game started? Were his eyes really that dark a blue, or was it an illusion created by the frames of his glasses? You aren’t sure anymore.

 

     The boilers kick off at the same time you shift out of your sheets. Sweeping your hair out of your eyes, you move to the end of the bed and slump over to hug Davesprite’s waist. You hear the click of him closing his laptop, and then his hand is stroking your hair. He tucks a long curl of it behind your ear.

     “Can you pass along a message for me?” you ask.

     He doesn’t respond. You have the side of your face pressed to his stomach, but you can’t hear the sound of his insides the way you could whenever you lay with your cheek against Bec’s belly. Instead, it sounds like a computer – bits of an aging server coughing and groaning. You almost think you hear the static blip of electricity underneath his skin.

     “Tell John I miss him,” you whisper. “And tell him I’m sorry.”

 


	42. Chapter 42

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 19 December, 2010

 

     If you had known about this program earlier, you would have used it to knock you out at night. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such an insomniac.

     Through the laptop speakers muffled by blankets, a weary narrator is describing the life cycle of gazelles with about the same enthusiasm as someone reading a eulogy. One of the critters dashes across the screen, hooves arching to leap through the underbrush. You close your eyes, your cheek squished against Jade’s leg. She rests her hand on your neck – with all the sighing you’ve done, she knows you’re bored out of your skull. She, however, is rapt with interest.

     The gazelle makes herself camouflage in the grass of the savannah, keeping a low profile as she takes her children to feed. The gazelle swivels her sensitive ears, wary of predators that may leap from the brush. The gazelle does this, the gazelle does that.

     Jade’s touch feels lighter, the voice of the narrator farther away, and then you’re falling away into sleep.

 

     The cool feeling of slipping through soapy water, a rush of air that’s stagnant with the memories inflating it. A feeling near solidity, and an impossible heaviness in your legs. Wait, your legs? Your legs!

     You take one awkward step, your foot barely lifting off the ground, but before you can complete the movement, you collapse. A painful, static sensation radiates down your lower half. It feels like someone’s stuck pins all up in your legs.

     This dream bubble burns your eyes with gold. It doesn’t take long to figure out where you are, even though this is your first time experiencing it. You know this is a dream bubble because it _has_ to be – the black of the Veil was too dark to allow glimpses of the colored spheres out there, but you can see them past the atmosphere now, and part of you is convinced that you can hear the clicking and gurgling of the horrorterrors.

     Sprawling in front of you is the entry to Hephaestus’ lair. Lava bubbles up and reflects off of the massive statue of a nakodile, painting the gold red. Deep inside the tunnel, a faint orange light is emanating. Oh, that’s why you thought you could hear the gods – a dream projection of your denizen is grumbling away in an eldritch tongue from within. The lava looks realistic enough, but you don’t feel the heat it radiates.

     You try to move your legs – Skaia has found it suitable to torment you by giving you the dream projection of your former self. You look just as you did before you self-prototyped, and you remove your sunglasses to push them into your hair. Easy to forget how annoying an overlay of black can be. One of your shoes is untied. For a short second, you consider tying it.

     Still, this is cool, isn’t it? You think you should consider this cool. The game considers you capable of dream projection. You’re still a participant. You’re still invited.

 

     You’re startled out of your shock by the sound of snickering and whispering behind you. You twist your torso around to look, and see that Hephaestus’ lair blends into the Prospitian skyline. The color of the gold is uninterrupted, all dazzling and bright. A Gothic-style bridge glints with thin accents of copper, and leaning against it is a clique of five dead Jades.

     They’re all terribly lanky, in more of a “young teenager” way and less of a “doesn’t eat enough” way. You have trouble believing that any of them were so adept at using rifles one-handed.

     “Welcome to Death, we’re the reception committee!” one giggles. She’s wearing a flouncy, two-tiered blue dress, and as she sways back and forth the hems bounce. This Jade gives a fake bow, which is imitated by the rest, which is then followed by more cackling.

     The sound of their voices unsettles you, and not just because you’re looking at a crowd of younger, deader editions of your girlfriend. Like, yeah, it’s odd seeing versions of her without dog ears, but something is terribly off about them. Even from where you sit, you can see the disturbing milkiness of their blank eyes.

     “I….”

     “What’s the matter, are you shy?” a Jade in a 3 A.M. dress pipes up. The rest of them titter, and the one in the blue dress elbows her in the side. Following the peal of girlish laughter, they all start to shush one another.

     Now you know why they’re disturbing you. They don’t _act_ like your Jade – they’re exaggerated and cartoonish. They’ve been dead for so long that they’ve become parodies of themselves.

     “I’m not…” you start. “You got it wrong. I’m not dead.”

     None of them respond at first. A Jade in bright yellow dream garb crosses her arms. She’s been quiet this whole time, perched on the ledge of the bridge, and by her self-assured positioning you guess that she’s the leader of the gang. An unimpressed sneer paints her face.

     “It doesn’t matter,” she snips. “You’ll join us sooner or later.”

           

     The look on her face freaks you out so badly that the fright ripples through you and makes your dream hologram dissolve. You wake up on Jade’s lap with a surprised caw. She jumps at your reaction – she hadn’t realized you were asleep. You blink a few times and look up at her, and it calms you down to see her dog ears, her face that isn’t marred with untold years of ghosthood.

     Your tail swishes in agitation over the sheets, the heavy static of your legs now gone. You don’t know whether it’s a relief not to be weighed down anymore, or a disappointment that you didn’t get to test out the ole walking poles for more than two seconds.

     “Hey,” you rasp. Your throat feels clogged. “Did you know I forgot how to walk?”


	43. Chapter 43

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> posting from the middle of a 12-hour layover in cologne. ive found the only power outlet in the whole airport. hurrah!

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 26 January, 2011

 

     There’s a deep and terrible void that sprawls under your feet, making you infinitesimal in its vastness. The silence is so loud that you can hear your blood coursing.

     Your fingers twitch forward. A shimmer of gasoline-green ribbons through them and twists away like a little fish in the tide pools, almost invisible, and some of its sheen is left on your skin. You have just enough connection to the Sun to analyze the particles, and you see that it is the time-worn dust of a million billion ghosts, their half-lives decayed until they’ve dispersed altogether. You shiver and try to wipe yourself clean of it, but it lodges in your cells and makes your skin sparkle with each turn of your hand.

     What prickles your nerves with unease is not the feeling of being trapped, but the awareness of how insignificant you are. You are at the bottom of the basin, a boundless and far-off reach of abyss beyond even the gods. Something about the experience of this feels unrepeatable.

     Almost against your will, your muscles relax and allow you to float until your knees are level with your chest. This place radiates with its wrongness. No colorful blotches of dream bubbles can be seen beyond the pitch, not even the unfurling tentacle of a far-off horrorterror lightyears wide. The black changes its hue, streaks itself with white and silver, and what pools together out of countless undead particles is a skeletal face of darkest green.

     A rippling gleam of chartreuse passes over them when their body forms a whole. Still they look phantasmal, transparent enough to pass a hand through, but despite this they seem more real than you. An abyssal black gleams to make their skin dissolve into the void, and as you look closer, you see that they are the robes of a god tier.

     “You’ve been waiting for me,” they say. She says? It’s a husky voice, akin to the throaty hissing of a jungle snake. She isn’t asking a question.

     “I… have?” Your timid response sounds like the plink of a water droplet into the ocean. You’re surprised she can hear you at all.

     “Yes, you have.” Her eyes are so, so _black_. “And now I am here.”

 

 

     You wake up with a paralyzing cold gripping your muscles, and the all-familiar urge that always presses behind your eyes. Your tears come fast, but it’s so hard to breathe that you can’t even think of wiping them away. They run off your jaw and splatter your clavicles. You try to count your inhalations, staring up at the dark ceiling.

     You are fucked. You are _so_ fucked, and you have known this for so long that having it confirmed makes it sear hotter in your brain. There is absolutely no way out of here. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Fuck. Fuck!

     Davesprite is sighing in his sleep. You force yourself to regain the feeling in your fingers and contemplate shaking him awake.

 

 

     “The whims of the game we play are fickle. There are many versions of you, just as there are many versions of me.” Calliope spins a spiral of white stars in her fingers, rolling them about like marbles. One by one, they fall from her palm and disappear into the black. Her bright green teeth click against each other when she speaks. “There is a version of you which has found her way to my corner of the Ring, and there is a version of you who dreams peacefully with the knowledge that her brother will be alive when she wakes.”

     Your heart pangs. “Did I just find my way here, or did you bring me?”

     No emotion passes across her face. “I unraveled this niche of the Furthest Ring to allow you inside. If you invaded this space out of coincidence, it would be mean that my defenses are failing.”

     “What reason could you possibly have for wanting to see me?”

     “You underestimate the intrinsic value that we Space players possess. The fact that you don the spiral grants you the ability to understand what I am about to tell you.” You think you see Calliope tilt her head, but maybe it’s a trick of the light. “Or perhaps not. But my impression of you is not that of a fool.”

     “How do you know I’m a god tier? I don’t….”

     “You have discarded the garments of your godhood. This does not mean I cannot see the mark that Skaia has impressed itself upon you. It lives in your veins, and it courses off of you.”

     You can no longer tell whether you’ve been here for two minutes or two weeks.

     “Okay… then what’s that got to do with anything?”

     “It means that as heroes of Space, we have our natural opposites stripped away from us. Just as I have been robbed of Time by dwindling away in a timeline unprepared to cope with my victory, you have been robbed of your own Time. And somewhere, your brother of Breath has had his Blood taken away.”

           

 

     “Dave. _Dave_.”

     You jostle Davesprite by the shoulder until his eyebrows scrunch together and he opens one eye. Then he sees that you’re wiping your palm across your cheeks to dry them, and he props himself up on one elbow.

     “What’s up?”

     You rub the side of your hand against your neck to wipe off the dried tracks of tears. “If you knew that the reason you were suffering was so that another version of you could be happy, would it make you feel less bad?”

     Davesprite exhales slowly through his nostrils, his chest rising and falling. His eyes linger on the folds of the fitted sheet.

     “I’ve already lived that reality, and I wouldn’t say that it made me feel too great. So, no.”

     Embarrassment burns under your skin. Stupid, tactless question. The room is so dark that you still can’t see the look on Davesprite’s face, but you can make out the slits of white in his tired eyes. It’s overlaid with the green that pokes through the sheet hung across the window – in the midst of last week’s migraine you covered it up for being too bright, then decided you liked the ambiance better.

     “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

     Davesprite exhales again, in less of a sad way this time, and brushes the strands of hair from your face.

     “What _do_ you mean?”

 

 

     “But each timeline gives as much as it takes, doomed or alpha as it may be. What one doomed thread lacks, the alpha takes on. For every alpha timeline that is absent one disaster, another doomed version absorbs it. It is unwise to think of one web of time as more ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ than another. Skaia does not deal in fairness, nor do I.”

     You don’t say anything.

     “A doomed timeline is nothing other than what it is. There is no hope beyond the horizon for those marked to fade away. However, they serve a purpose all the same. Every failure we take on ensures the success of another. We allow a better version of ourselves to flourish. In this way, we participate vicariously in the victory.”

     “That’s… poetic.”

     “I am not familiar with the concept.”

     One of your ears swivels back, embarrassed.

     “I am sure you will understand me, Jade, when I tell you that free will can only carry us so far. Skaia snips our threads as soon as we tread from the chosen path.”

     “But…?”

     “Though you feel something has been ripped from you, you will get it back one day. The hero of Space will regain her lost Time, and the hero of Breath will reunite with his Blood.”

 

 

     That’s the problem, isn’t it. A version of you is sailing through the Yellow Yard with her brother. A version of your brother is alive. A version of John is here, sleeping in a room plastered with movie posters scrubbed clean of their oil. That version is not for you to share – and the horrible ache in your chest is payment. You hope she appreciates your sacrifice.

     The tracing of Davesprite’s claws lingers on your skin. Your vision strays to the ragged scar of orange running down his chest, the result of so much time and work and love. It’s still healing shut by the day, readjusting itself to life without the permanent fixture of a sword.

     What _do_ you mean?

     You blink slowly, and your eyelids burn. “I mean… I think we might really be screwed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> doubt it but ok


	44. Chapter 44

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what was this chapter gonna be about again? (checks the outline) ohhhh. uh oh.

PRNS Basilica. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 April, 2011

 

     The door to the living room screeches all the way open. Yellow light pours in to illuminate the hazy darkness.

     Somehow, it still smells like smoke.

 

     Jade takes one step over the threshold, then another. Her ears are perked to full attention, like she expects something to launch out of the shadows. You trail closely behind, feeling a little bit like you’re using her as a human shield. When you close the door behind you, the room is cast once more in dark green light from the two porthole windows.

     This room has been closed off for two years. Its smell has stagnated, mixing with the metallic stench to become sulfuric and tickling.

     You draw your wings tighter to you. Nothing has changed – duh, why did you expect it to be different? There’s John’s sofa next to the fridge, the seat cushions permanently indented by family bonding. Perpendicular to it is a stiff, museum exhibit-looking couch from Jade’s house, vines and grapes carved into the slick edging. Green light reflects off of peeling, century-old globes, and Jade’s fingers trace one of them on her way to the window. It starts to swivel, then thinks better of the idea.

     It all comes back to you, those hours of bitching and bickering and figuring out whose stuff was gonna go where. Electing the arrangement of wall hangings took three times, during which Jade changed her vote twice, and then it came down to rock, paper, scissors. John got paper to your rock, effectively snubbing having any more edgy Banksy-looking monstrosities put up, so you took your fist and bashed it over the top of his hand.

     If it didn’t seem like he hated you so much, that whole night would’ve been a dream come true – you wondered what it was like to mess around with people and not have it be underlined with a concerning streak of aggression. Too bad you didn’t get to convince him your company was worthwhile.

     Her fingers travel to the rim of the lampshade on the table, and the bits of dust that cling to its edges wobble in the light.

 

     “Do you know what my last memories were before I became Jadesprite?”

     You’re surprised – she hasn’t claimed ownership of her identity before. Well, you mean, she _has_ , but not so… blatantly. Try as you might, you can’t get a read off of her. The light makes her all shadow, a thin halo of chartreuse outlining her hair.

     "Prospit’s moon was falling. He had severed the chain.” Dust and hair flies from the canvas of the lampshade, floating to become dust particles in the light. It all drifts lazily into the beam of green. “John was still asleep. He fell from his tower, and I dove towards Skaia after him. Fire was everywhere – it roared in my ears. I couldn’t hear anything else.

     “When I caught him, I tried to shake him awake, but he just wouldn’t wake up. We kept falling. He slipped from my hands, and then the smoke swallowed him. When I looked up….”

     She hangs her head.

     Your tail flicks over the rug. Its pattern has been blurred at the edges, beaten down with years of being walked all over. If you approached her, you’d startle her. But you can’t think of anything to say.

     “When I was very young, especially once I became alone… all I wanted was for the boy in the other tower to wake up. The White Queen told me he was my brother.” Jade toys with the harlequin on the table, sharp diamonds of black and white gleaming as she turns it in her hands. She sounds less sad, and more unaware of how she’s gotten here. “I had to pretend I didn’t know, and keep doing so even during the game. Like how I’ve pretended not to know a lot of things.

     “As I grew up, he was the only human I could actually see. _Every_ day I waited. After I got Pesterchum and started talking to you all, I stopped spending so much time in his room. It felt like an invasion of privacy once I got to know him. But I never stopped wishing he would wake up.”

     She sets the figure down, and you see that its base has left a circle of clean wood among the dust.

     “I felt that I could tell you and Rose some of what I experienced every day. You hardly ever took anything at face value, so it felt safer to slip traces of what my life was really like to you two. I didn’t do that for John, though. I wanted him to wake up on his own. For it to be a surprise.”

     Jade turns around and folds her arms, leaning against the porthole sill. You still can’t see her face.

     “Dreaming was the only time I was truly relaxed. I wanted to share that with him. And when I died, staying dead was easier than remembering how I had failed him.”

     A few responses come to mind. _It’s not your fault_ , y _ou didn’t fail him_ , _it helped him go god tier, really, if you think about it_ , but none of it seems right. So you don’t say anything.

     She puts her face in her hands, burrowing it deep while her shoulders start to quiver, and you feel that your throat is burning from the imminent need to cry. It’s a delicate balance. You can either drift over, _do_ something about it and risk crying yourself, thus making her feel _worse_ , or you could just… what? Just float here like a tool? Jade smothers a sob, but it’s utterly unconvincing. She steels herself completely still, and it lends even more to the appearance of someone who very badly does not want you to know they’re crying. She’s a terrible actor.

     Slowly, slowly, Jade slumps down against the wall, her legs sprawled in front of her until her feet almost touch the blackened scorch mark of LOWAS’ two-year-old explosion. Her hands shake in front of her face. The sight of her sends a violent ripple of sorrow through you. Not even pity, just a horrible yawning empathy that threatens to tear you open entirely.

     You swoop forward so that your belly almost brushes the carpet, occupying the space that her legs leave on the floor. Your tail skims across the fabric, and you feel with an awful shudder that you’re brushing the ashen remains of a dead planet. Jade does not take her hands from her eyes, but she allows you to wind your arms under hers to pull her against you. You press your cheek to the top of her head, and when you finally begin to cry, Jade is the first one to notice. It makes her curl her legs inward with a fresh sob, and she peels her fingers away to wrap her arms around your neck. Her crying is quiet, like she’s still trying to press a pillow over it all, and it makes her tears come faster.

 

     It’s unclear how long you sit like this, curled into the other as you wait for the crying to finally stop. But it does, as it always must, and Jade’s eyes are red when she pulls away to remove her glasses. You keep your arms around her, and when you take her face in your hands, you can see that the details of your face are unclear to her. She squints to see you, and her eyes film over once again. You run a thumb over her cheek, and you think you feel her shoulders relax.

     “We can’t come in here again,” you whisper.

     She nods her head just once, her lips becoming a straight line. “I know.”


	45. Chapter 45

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was going to update tonight anyway but SOMEBODY - not naming names - stole my thunder. typical.
> 
> EDIT: UHHHH FUCK THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN JADE'S POV..... FIXED.....

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 29 August, 2011

 

     “Notice how it’s not quite yellow yet? How it’s got this beautiful yellow-green hue to it? _That_ is how you know it’s ripe.”

     “I see. It’s stuck in color wheel purgatory.”

     You use your shears to snip a lime from its potted tree. It falls with a thump into your glove, and you beam down at it. This is the best part of harvesting – seeing those long months of waiting and watering come into full bloom. It goes into a basket with the rest of the bright green fruit.

     “Now, if you pay attention and take notes, you might be able to pass the hands-on exam.” You tilt your wide-brimmed hat so that a shadow crosses your face. You’ve had to snip holes in them so your ears can poke through, and they swivel involuntarily. “If you pick any that aren’t ripe yet, you will have to relearn how to play dodgeball.”

     “Ah, man. That blows.”

     “There is nothing to worry about. I’m sure you’ll pass with flying colors.”

     After a well-fought campaign of gentle encouragement and being (nicely) forced to water your plants twice a week, you have finally succeeded in getting Davesprite to properly participate in gardening. He’s getting good at it, and you make sure he knows it, but you don’t think he believes you. The dirt always gets under his talons, something he’s always ready to moan about, but they don’t make gloves for folks with “velociraptor fingers,” either. Nevertheless, you think it’s always the effort that counts. He tries, and he never slacks off, and you think that is enough.

     Now, you’re clipping dead leaves from the lime trees, your feet tapping against the tiles to match the tune of the song playing over the speakers. It’s crackled with time and wear, the kind of audio distortion that Davesprite calls “an unfinished harsh noise remix of the original.” Across the atrium, he’s making himself inconspicuous. What he’s trying to do is make a cautious effort of switching out the mulch from a row of asparagus. They’re just babies, not even two months old, and the slow movements of his hands tells you he feels like he’ll kill them if he so much as jostles them. This job used to take you ten minutes at most. Part of you itches to take over. Better not – he’ll get better if you let him figure it out for himself.

     “When I was starting up the garden, my grandpa told me that limes were lemons who had attitude. They needed to be picked sooner because they were so annoying.” You hold a lime to your ear and shake it. “For a few years after that, I was convinced that the fruits could talk, but that they just didn’t like me enough to talk back.”

     This draws a laugh out of him, a blurry distinction between a crow’s caw and a human vocalization.

     “Shit, Jade. You were too young to be havin’ that kinda self-esteem. That’s reserved for the prime of our lives. Those fun and flirty emo years.”

     You snort. It’s still clear in your memory – finding what you thought were smiling faces in the pores and bruises and freckles of the fruits’ skins. You would lean with your chin on the table’s edge, blowing the leaves with your breath and willing them to answer you.

     “Come on, say something,” you’d hiss. Bec would grunt, lifting his head, then realize you weren’t speaking to him and fall back asleep.

     They never did, obviously. You were never so desperate for interaction that you pretended they could actually speak. Pretending you could hear voices was strictly limited to humans.

 

     “There was this community garden that was on my way to school,” Davesprite recalls. “Sometimes if I missed the bus, I’d walk past it while I was goin’ to the next stop. One of those little alleyway plots that probably didn’t get enough sun. At the end of summer, there would be limes growin’ all up along the fence. They were always pretty sad, though. Looked like prunes with gangrene.”

     “Someone should have revoked their property lease. What a waste of potentially sustainable land.”

     “Yeah.”

     You lift your eyes just a bit and see him picking a clump of soil out from under one of his talons. His nose crinkles up at the smell of the soil, something you’re so used to that it doesn’t even register anymore. He pats it down, then second guesses himself and tosses it up looser with his claws. You bite your tongue and refrain from telling him that it was fine the first time.

     “I would be going back to school right about now if the game hadn’t happened. Hard to tell, they always change what the first day’s gonna be.”

     His voice trails off, and you feel yourself relax a bit. It’s nice when you think he’s about to dive into a monologue – it gives you time to digest and think of a response. That, and you’re so used to listening that it seems better than talking for yourself. After all this time, talking still makes quick work of running your throat ragged.

     “That’s one thing I don’t miss. SBURB might be a fucked up game, but at least it released me from my obligations to the Texas public school system.”

     “Hmm. It doesn’t sound so bad to me. You have almost the _whole_ day to see people who are, like… the same age and species as you! I would have loved that.”

     “That’s because the gravity of the entire concept still eludes you.”

     “Sure, that’s it.”

     “All my countless hours of creative outpour wasted, because Jade still doesn’t understand the true horror of what it is to be a cog in the wheel of the American education system.” He acts like he’s about to faint, gripping onto the table for support.

     “Be careful, you’re waxing poetic.” A leaf spirals into the pocket of your apron, and you pluck it out to put it in a box with the rest. The texture of it is waxy.

     “What I need to do is a _Schoolhouse Rock_ remix. Bring that shit to the current day. Conjunction junction, what’s your _fucking_ function.”

     “If you end up finishing it, please keep it to yourself.”

     “You don’t wanna contribute a sick bass riff? It’s got all the elements of a Billboard 100 hit – nostalgic appeal, an easygoing tone… I’d lay down a rap in the middle to keep it modern. Uh, what else… a bunch of words that sound the same.”

     “Songs typically have that going for them, yes. It’s called rhyming.”

     “I’m telling you, this could really get your career off the ground.”

     The garden shears squeak in a tarnished kind of way. You like the sound of it, comparable to the clunk of a hole puncher. You tilt your hat up to show your whole face.

     “I prefer to keep my sick bass riffs to more humble pastures.”

 

 

     The atrium lulls into an easy silence, the snazzy trumpet over the speakers fading into the background. One by one, the pots of tiny trees lose all their color, replaced by baskets full of vibrant fruit. After what feels like forever, Davesprite finally finishes the asparagus. You can tell he’s done because he sits on the ledge of the table, excavating dirt from under his talons. He wipes one of his hands under his nose, and the smell of soil seems to hit him. He sneezes twice, making his feathers puff up each time.

     “Bless you,” you murmur.

     “Thanks.”

     You’re close to zoning out. This is what gardening does to you – you go on autopilot, pinpointing tasks that need to be done and carrying them out with scarcely another thought. When Davesprite speaks again, you almost don’t hear him.

     “Hey, Jade?”

     “Hm.”

     “How would you rate the smell of dirt on like, a scale of one to ten?”

     Now that you’ve filled the baskets, you’re on the hunt for any pruning that needs to be done. It makes you feel authoritative, like you’re helping your plants stay in line. No brown petals, no problems. You lift your face from grooming a pot of hydrangeas, picking wilted petals out of their clusters.

     “Well,” you start. “I associate it with the atrium, of course, which I find to be very relaxing. So I think it’s a good smell.”

     “Gimme a number.”

     “I give it a solid 9.5. The other 0.5 is because it’s still dirt. Why?”

     He fidgets with his fingers, pretending that he’s cleaning them like a preening bird. “Uh. One of my first impressions of you when the trip started was that you smelled like dirt. I mean, not _just_ dirt, but like… an oceany smell? I didn’t know how to tell you without it sounding like an insult.”

     You tilt the brim of your hat down to hide your smile.

     “It went away after a while, but I guess it came back from us being in here so much. I was just… reminded of it.”

     “So you’re trying to compliment me for smelling like dirt?”

     “It doesn’t sound as smooth when you put it that way.”

     You pop your gardening hat off with a sound like a _poof_. Your ears flick, the skin of your scalp sighing with relief. “I’ll take it as a compliment.”

     Maybe he exhales, but maybe you’re imagining it.

     You twist your apron around to untie the bow. Davesprite hops down and stands at full attention – you’ve accidentally trained him like Pavlov’s dog to understand that this gesture means you’re ready to go. Then the gloves come off, and the only sign left that you’ve been doing any work is the smudge of dirt that you feel under your eye and the sheen of sweat on your arms. It’s all washed away under the water that spurts from the sillcock, and the metallic smell of the water calms you down. Being sweaty from gardening has never felt gross to you.

     Davesprite uses the opportunity to wash under his talons. Then he tries to dry his hands on the bottom of your shirt, and you swat him on the arm. Flecks of water stick to your hip.

     “Ugh!”

     “You should invest in towels.”

     “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

     Your hem feels all damp now. You walk away to pop the needle off of the record. It spins, spins, spins, then stops to reveal a fading green and yellow record label in the middle. The atrium is silent.

     No use in staying mad. You rest your chin on his shoulder and flare your nostrils.

     “You smell like a nerd.”

     “What’s that smell like.”

     You turn your nose up at him, then lift your chin up and stroll over to the transportalizer. “Like oranges and birdseed.”

     And then you’re gone in a zap of green fire. He’ll follow you, as you know he will, and from your space between the bookends of the material universe, you can see him sighing up in the atrium, a tinge of gold spreading across his face.


	46. Chapter 46

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 30 September, 2011

 

     The sound of fabric billowing, and the steady rhythm of Jade combing out her still-damp curls of hair. You start to fall asleep, but then a draft blows through the open window. The yellow sheets that have been hung up to dry wave desperately into the room, wiggling their hems for attention. You grimace and huddle into yourself.

     “I’m cold,” you complain.

     Jade tugs her comb through a stubborn knot at the bottom of her hair. “Then you can take the half-pound of feathers I shook out of the sheets and tape them back on.”

     “I can’t believe I’m catching flack for my natural functions. You can’t fight the molting, Jade. You gotta accept it as part of your life.”

 

     This room, like most in the Harley Helltower, is all but empty. Since the ocean no longer poses the imminent threat of mildew, Jade has taken down the curtains and allowed light to pour in from all angles. It gives you the vibe of being in the office of some ridiculously powerful CEO, one of those circular rooms with gleaming floors where the only chair is as far away from The Big Man’s desk as possible. Except instead of having the NYC skyline just outside, you have countless miles of rainforest. The Forge makes up for the lack of an Empire State Building, though.

     You’d rather be back in your room. This couch is stiff and refuses to absorb your body heat, so it always feels like you’ve just sat down. By one of the open windows, Jade sits with her back to you, using the glass as a mirror. Sometimes she likes to multitask – the heated water from the tower’s geothermal base is as good for showering as it is for laundry. Your nerdy poncho flails on the clothesline and obscures the top half of her.

     Jade’s hair has only gotten bigger since your journey began. She refuses to snip it down to size, and because of her stubborn denial that her hair is about to swallow her whole, Jade looks to her First Guardian powers to keep it in check. In front of her “mirror,” Jade’s hair glows chartreuse as it separates itself into long strands. They braid each other together, a hydra tangling up its necks.

     This is more than you could say for yourself. You just keep floating higher and higher above her to make her think you’re getting taller.

 

     She hums to herself, and because of this room’s freaky acoustics, you can hear it as if she’s perched beside you. “A long time ago, I saw this video of a crow taking a bath in someone’s tub,” Jade says offhandedly. “It spread out its wings and flapped them under the water, then hopped out and clicked down the hallway. _So_ cute.”

     Jade turns her head back. Two years ago, you might have avoided eye contact – her towel is so loose that thirteen-year-old you would be reduced to a stuttering panic. But now, you don’t care so much.

     “Do you ever want to jump under running sinks?” she asks.

     “There is not a sink big enough on this ship to cater to the specific needs of these babies.” You fluff up your wings, and they spread out to hide the back of the couch in its entirety. “Besides, your water takes forever to heat up. Could fill a pool before I felt safe goin’ under it.”

     This is not necessarily true. You have spent many nights on LOFAF poking your sprite tail into its pools, waiting for the lava to surge underneath and heat it up. It can take a while, but your wings aren’t gonna clean themselves of their oil. Being underwater is so much better now that you don’t have legs – it makes you feel like a mermaid, your tail turning something like green in the blue water. Loose feathers come away from your limbs and float to the surface, and they form shadows against the light. It’s like being in a movie. But you’d be too embarrassed to tell Jade that.

     “I suppose that’s the curse of those whose wingspans restrict them from normal showers. Life must be hard when you don’t have a geothermal system keeping everything nice and warm.”

     “Yeah, ‘cept your old volcano is gone.”

     “Yes. It got replaced with a bigger one.”

     “I bet they’re not even connected. I bet your house is bein’ powered by the same kinda magic that’s runnin’ through all of our houses. The same way we got water and electricity.”

     “Dave, these planets are huge. There’s _got_ to be some sort of generator that allows electricity to function in the Medium. Even if it can’t be seen.” Jade unravels part of her braid, unsatisfied, and weaves it again by hand.

     “Yeah, and does Skaia have its own public WiFi? How about your spacey powers, huh?”

     Jade snorts. “I’m still figuring that one out.” Her fingers glow with the sheen of the Green Sun, as if mentioning her powers has summoned them out of hiding. “Teleportation is one thing – wormhole theories have existed long enough. But manipulating the size of things… that’s another matter. Your molecules can’t get any smaller. I wonder if changing the size of things is simply removing, adding, and rearranging their containing atoms… but I can see them as they move and change, and that doesn’t _seem_ to be what’s happening.”

     “You can see atoms?”

     “Of course.”

     “And you don’t believe in magic.”

     “Dave!”

     “You know, your quantum physics and molecular theory can coexist with whatever nutjob wizardly is happening out here. Skaia’s a sentient planet, Jade. We know this. It’s programmed knowledge.” You tap your temple.

     Jade sticks her tongue out at you. “We can use magic as the go-to explanation. Mark my words, though: everything in this game can be explained with _real_ science. It’s a _game_ , Dave. Games need to be coded and programmed. They _run_ on science.”

     “I believe you. It just makes me feel better to think that I’m magical.” You flutter your wings for dramatic effect.

     Flipping her braid over her shoulder, Jade turns back to the window and yanks her towel off. You look away out of impulse. There’s an electrical crackle when she zaps a new outfit on. It’s made from one of the fabric patterns Nanna has occupied her time by alchemizing – all yellow and blue. Very sixties. Her damp feet leave prints of condensation across the floor.

     You adjust your position so that you’re not monopolizing the couch anymore. Jade lands beside you, draping her legs over your tail. With the hand that isn’t hanging over the back of the couch, you hold her thigh. It warms you up from the chill of the breeze – utterly unaffected, Jade’s skin still radiates heat.

     “The only thing magical about you is the lengths you will go to in order to disgrace the natural sciences.”

     “That and my otherworldly good looks.”

     Jade tucks her head into the crook of your neck. The fur of her ear tickles your face. “Whatever you want to tell yourself.”

     “Wow, can’t believe this sass is coming from the yiff enabler herself.”

     “Oh my _god_ , do not call it that.”

     “Why not call it what it is.”

     She sneers. “You are so gross.”

     You give a crow of cackling laughter at the look on her face. “Okay. Let’s say we get five judges from the highest FurAffinity echelons in here–”

     “You are unbelievable.”

     “Four are dressed in their best business casual, but the fifth is committed and follows the other four in their $2,000 coyote-hellhound fursuit.”

     “Ugh.”

     “And they’re scribbling furiously on their clipboards and whispering to each other, and the one in the fursuit is writing fastest of all, but the paw makes it hard to write so they keep dropping their pen.”

     Jade huffs. “You’ve really thought this out.”

     “I know. And they go into a football huddle and the one in the fursuit is like – ‘yup, this is 100% bona fide yiff, good show.’ But you can’t really hear them through the mask.”

     “More like… bona fide voyeurism.”

     “That’s probably an entire category on FurAffinity.”

     “Pssh, no it’s not.”

     “You would know.”

 

     Neither of you are awake enough to continue the rapid-fire banter shoot-off. Jade’s hair is still drying, and the wet curls of it plaster themselves to your chest. You release a wide yawn, and Jade tries to resist the contagion, but then she yawns as well.

     “Still cold?” she murmurs. She already sounds ready to fall asleep. Her standards for napworthy locations remain an inch off the ground.

     “Nah.” Your thumb traces a spot on her leg where three freckles form a perfect triangle.

     She rests her cheek against your collarbone. “Good.”

 

     You grip her leg tighter against you, and as you feel her nod off into unconsciousness, a horrible nostalgia opens up inside of you. Very soon, everything is about to change. All of this is going to slip from your grasp. There will be no planet-hopping, there will be no coerced weekly dinners courtesy of Nanna, there will be no days spent watching shitty YouTube videos in bed. There will only be a great unknown, faces and voices that you no longer recognize, and the awful knowing that somehow, somewhen, it will all unravel. And the Furthest Ring waits.

     The bedsheets should be nearly dry. They’re transparent in the light, blurs of white shining through the gold, but you’ve lost your desire to return to the room. You’d rather stay like this for as long as time will allow, the canopy of LOFAF’s forest rustling and Jade’s warm skin against yours.

 


	47. Chapter 47

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 14 November, 2011

 

     “Now, let’s put this in perspective. Jade – if _you_ met a version of yourself who was elderly and also happened to be a ghost with a dashing color scheme, would you find it strange if she had a gift prepared for you?”

     “After all we’ve already seen, no.”

     Nanna huffs.

     Every single sound in the kitchen is elevated when no one else is left. Only the light over the sink remains on, your conversation underlined with the mechanical rumbling of the nearly overloaded dishwasher. Floating around Nanna with cyan-outlined halos are the pots and pans that wouldn’t fit. An array of dishrags generated with sprite magic are busy scrubbing away. You, however are taking your time, your sleeves rolled up to your elbows.

     “ _Would_ it be odd if I presented her with something? I could get out the crochet needles… oh, well, I wouldn’t have her measurements, would I?”

     “I can just change the size for you if it doesn’t fit.”

     “That is true!” Nanna pushes her glasses further up her nose. “Hmm, in that case I could go the safe route and make her a sweater. Ah, but April isn’t terribly cold….”

     “You still have six months to think about it,” you assure her.

     You gather a bouquet of golden spoons in your hand, the metal clattering up against the inside of the sink. The water ricochets off of their curvature, and you yelp when it almost hits you in the glasses.

     “You should be careful,” Nanna laughs. “My conscious could never handle the weight of you going blind under my supervision.”

     You rub your wrist across your cheek and grin.

     “And if you’re blind, my dear, then you can’t judge the final product!”

     “I’m sure it will be lovely no matter what.”

     “Ah, you flatter me.”

     Nanna’s mouth settles into a nervous smile. Her fingers jitter, her eyes scrunched up in the way they do when she can’t think of a solution to her crosswords. It’s a look you’ve come to recognize as the curtain draws nearer across your time in the Yellow Yard. The confidence of age, the cheeky foreknowledge of a longtime sprite – all of it has started to buckle under the shadow of that growing window outside.

     “I want…” she starts. “I _really_ want to make a good impression.”

     From the corner of your eye, you take a short glance at her. Her appearance has become more or less normal over the years – you’re not sure what you would do if she had legs or normal clothes or skin that wasn’t tinted blue. So she doesn’t look whimsical or funny or even unusual to you. She just looks confused and scared. You return your gaze to the sink.

     “Jane will love you,” you say after a while. “I already know it.”

     Jaspers snakes along the floor, winding himself in loops between your ankles and the curl of Nanna’s tail. His purrs radiate off of him. The fur of his cheek brushes your leg, and for a flash of a second your skin recognizes it as Bec’s. You bite your bottom lip hard.

     This is the agreement you’ve reached, and it’s worked well enough to put a stop to the chasings and the hissings and the barkings. Just don’t look down.

     “Not now, kitty,” you murmur. “My hands are wet. You’ll get your fur all over them.”

     Rose’s cat grumbles with distaste and retreats to the shadow of the barstools. “Yuck! Don’t get water on my coat!”

     “Which coat?” Nanna chuckles. Her ghost hand travels under the kitchen island to scratch behind his ears, and another dishrag generates itself with a sound like a soap bubble in order to pick up the slack.

 

           

     It’s a concerted effort for Nanna to be relaxed. Even after you’ve set the dishes up to dry, wiped the counter down for a third time, and swept up last crumbs that have escaped her notice, she still finds it difficult to relax. Her eyes keep darting behind you, like she’s contemplating drying and putting away the dishes herself. You sit with your backs against the island, her tail curling and uncurling around the leg of the barstool. The shadows of it make arabesques on the floor.

     “You’re very excited to meet her, aren’t you?” you ask.

     Nanna’s cheeks run blue. “Oh, Jade. You know me – always forgetting my own age. I can say that it’s going to be very exhilarating to see my own face in front of me. Just imagine! We’re the same person, but we’ve grown up in entirely separate worlds. Perhaps it’ll be a reality check for me.”

     She tries to fold her hands in her lap, but with one hand she just ends up fiddling with the hem of her tunic.

     “I hope she was happy,” she says quietly.

     “Were you?”

     Nanna appears surprised by the question. Her white eyebrows shoot upward.

     “By the end of life, yes, I suppose I had no complaints. My business lasted for a long time, I had the frequent visits of my son to look forward to. I was actually able to _retire_. Why, all those hours I spent making iced tea… I can’t even make a guess.” Nanna sighs and looks up at the ceiling. Something sputters in the light above. “It’s always exciting to think who you might have been if the circumstances were different. I suspect our young Jane lives somewhere much nicer than where I called home.”

     She lulls into a contemplative silence, and you distract yourself by circling one of the freckles on your hand.

     “If I had to tell you just why it is that I’m excited… well, it’s a nice reward to look forward to, isn’t it? This game has been such a whirlwind of excitement, and we’ve gone through so much. No matter what happens to me by the end of this game, I’ll be content if I can look her in the face and be able to tell she’s done well. Knowing that she’s working hard the same way you have… that’s enough for me. I just want to see some version of me have a real adventure.”

     This makes your stomach hurt.

     “Mom?”

     “Yes, dear?”

     A surprised shiver twinges in your spine. You have never called Nanna this before – not in the proper noun form, anyway. The swiftness of her response is another shock; she doesn’t pause for a moment, doesn’t even react. You wonder if she’s been called “mom” for so long that responding to it has become a reflex, even if the person saying it isn’t John’s father.

     You swallow the lump in your throat. “I’m sorry I ruined this journey for you.”

     Nanna gives you an expression that could almost be called pity, but you’ve known her long enough to know that it is only a great, empathetic love. She can’t scoot any closer to you – the barstools are bolted down, after all – but she shortens the distance between you by unraveling her tail and nudging you in the leg.

     “I’ve been through a lot in my life,” she exhales. “ _Two_ world wars, a runaway brother, a stepmother that would make Cinderella’s faint. Unfulfilled revenge, a dead husband, an empty house, and a murdered son with whom I was never able to reunite. Not to mention the meteor that struck me stone cold dead!”

     She thumbs her sprite pendant, and two plates in the drying rack clink together as they settle. You stare out the windows on the double doors, seeing nothing but the dim bronze lit by the emergency lights.

     “If I had never died, I’d be over a hundred years old. You experience a lot of heartbreak in that time.” Nanna chews her lip. “No one left this game without wounds, and there are only more difficulties to come beyond that window. But I’m thankful that I got to come back and help him, even if our time together was brief. I’m proud of what he accomplished, and I’m glad I got to be a part of his journey.”

     It takes everything in you not to fall apart when you feel Nanna’s hand on your shoulder.

     “Please believe me, Jade.” Her voice is so low. “Everything that has happened to us has had a greater meaning. I know this as a sprite, and so have you. There exists no meaningless action under Skaia’s gaze. You _will_ know the purpose to which all of this has served. Just wait a little longer.”

     You’re startled when the barstool squeaks. Nanna turns to face you fully, and it takes a moment to reciprocate the gesture. It’s painful to look at her. The bottom of your eyes tremble, forcing yourself not to cry. But her face makes it hard. Nanna gazes at you with such a tenderness that you feel something inside of your chest swell. This time, the word that comes to mind is apt – maternal.

     “I can see myself in you,” Nanna says. Her words almost warble, and you notice with a jolt that her eyes are glazed over. “The determination, the kind heart, and the relentless desire to make others happy. Even my good looks!”

     You crack a smile at this, and the sudden movement of your muscles makes the tears come. The laughter that you share in the next moment is shaky and wet, and you don’t bother to wipe them away because Nanna does it for you. Her hand is cold against your skin, brushing your tears dry so softly that you barely feel it.

     She takes the side of your face in her hand, and you lean your weight into it. You know she sees what you have already noticed for yourself – the bits and pieces that make you so undeniably linked by the unfathomable science of ectobiology. But what inspires her gentle look is not that her DNA was spliced with someone else’s to create yourself, nor even that you share that same DNA with the one missing from this picture. It’s because over the last three years, she has truly and properly _raised_ you. You have finally felt what it is like to call someone a mother, and now that you’ve experienced it, you cannot bear to let it go.

     “You are my daughter,” she whispers. “And now, all I wish for is your happiness. I couldn’t ask any more from you.”

     Nanna pulls you into a hug, and you squeeze your eyes shut against her shoulder. For a shining moment, the sadness is almost outweighed by the glorious, sun-bright acknowledgement of the bond between you. You are someone’s daughter. You belong. Your chest rises and falls, your breathing labored with the effort it takes to steady it.

 

     There’s a sound like a fly buzzing by your ear, and then the fluorescent lights above the kitchen island start to flicker. You pull yourself out of Nanna’s embrace. The lights go out completely for two seconds, and then they cough themselves back to life.

     “Oh my,” she sighs. “I think the circuits are going haywire on us again.”

     “Yeah. I’ll go down and mess with it.” You’re surprised by how tired you sound.

     Nanna tilts her head. “All right, Godspeed. Goodnight, Jade.”

     “Goodnight, Mom.”

 

     The hallway is silent when you leave the kitchen. In the underbelly of the ship, boilers are thumping away and circuit breakers are getting fussy. This battleship wasn’t meant for three years of being blasted through the abyss near the speed of light. You may not sleep very well tonight.

     As the double doors settle behind you and thunk into place, you stare at your feet and will them to move forward. And then you’re down the hallway, and then you’re in the shadow cast by the flickering emergency lights, and then you’re leaning against the plated wall for fear of collapsing, and then you’re crying quietly into your hands, the sound of it muffled by the churning of the ship’s organs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if ur feelin down why not have ur mom put her weird jello hand on ur face


	48. Chapter 48

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 09 January, 2012

 

     The rough edges of your bayonets are speckled with sparks when they clash together. You clench your teeth when they grate surfaces, but then Jade’s upper arm strength gets the best of you and forces the end of your rifle into retreat. Your bayonet stabs into the soft mud, and the tip of hers nearly brushes you in the head. This is how you “win” – get bopped with the other’s weapon, and you’re out of the game. But you sling yourself backward to duck from her aim, then raise your rifle again and jam the bayonet between her rib and forestock. She gasps when her gun is shoved into an upward diagonal, and surprise causes her to pull the trigger. The crack of the bullet makes your ears sting.

     “Ah!”

     Jade’s ears press themselves against her hair, and you take advantage of her shock to pull yourself upright. The scuffle begins. For a moment you both forget what kind of weapons you’re wielding – your forestocks clack against one another, and you hold onto the bottom of the rifle’s stock to push her back. This is easier said than done, considering you can’t put any weight into your legs. It all quickly devolves into musketeer fighting, and you feel like you should have a sombrero and a snazzy bandana to go along with the rhythmic, metallic clashes of your guns.

     “You’re – going – to – have – to – do – better – than – _that_!” Jade spits. She drives you backward with a grunt like a tennis player, and you scramble to regain your grasp on the rifle before it falls out of your hands.

     “Watch yourself,” she teases. One way you can tell she’s getting rightfully overconfident.

     “Clumsy me,” you mutter.

     You find that your palms are sweating when you’ve gotten your hands properly positioned again. Jade doesn’t bother to adopt your pose – she doesn’t have to. She holds her rifle loosely, and from where you float, the shining tip of her bayonet replaces one of her eyes. If she were more morbidly excited about your training sessions, this is when her supervillain one-liner would be delivered.

     The light makes it hard to see, but through your squinting you can spot the twitch of her finger as she’s about to pull the trigger. You brace your shoulders for the kickback of the rifle’s butt. It’s a visceral fear that still accompanies this part of your dueling. Part of you is always going to remember those late night shoot-em-up movies on Spike and TNT, gritty stubble-faced men going around blasting bad guys from warehouse windows. Part of you is always going to be awfully, horribly afraid of something going tremendously _wrong_ , and it is this hesitance that could get you killed when you pass into the next session. Shoot or be shot. You squeeze your eyes shut and fire.

     Jade gasps. The pain in your collar convinces you that you’ve been hit, but you’re unscathed – your bullets have met in mid-air and exploded between you. The fibers of them are still settling, flecks floating like dust in the beams shining through the branches. They’re made of material like cork, soft and mostly unlikely to bruise as long as you shoot from far enough away. You exhale with relief.

     The echoes of your barrels die down. Flocks of hummingbirds still swarm from the surrounding trees, their tiny wings beating in retreat from the sound. Jade sighs and lets her barrel fall to face the earth, and after a moment, you lower your rifle as well.

     “Well,” she says. She wipes the sweat from her temple. “I won’t say we’re evenly matched, but you’re a close second.”

     Jade extends her hand in an offer to help you up, and you titter nervously as you brush it away.

     “I don’t have legs, Jade. I can get up just fine.” The adrenaline that still rushes in your neurons makes you sound more irritated than nervous, but Jade seems to know this already. She doesn’t give you a look, just smirks and tugs you from the ground anyway.

     “Sure you can.” Jade takes her thumb and index finger and flicks a splotch of dirt from the corner of your mouth. “Ready to go back?”

     “Nah, you already know how much I love shootin’ at my friends. Should know better than to give a Texan ammunition. If you give a mouse a cookie, man….”

     Jade thumps you on the shoulder, and you almost grimace when she hits you right in the sore spot of your skin. “All right, all right. Come on, then.”

 

     The strap that hooks onto the underside of your rifle bounces annoyingly against your ribs. You can’t sling it across your back as well as Jade can – your wing gets stuck, and the last thing you need when trying to open fire on a mountain-sized underling is to flap your wings like a doofus and shed feathers all over the ground. Ignoring the clumsiness of your anatomy, you’ve been getting better. Your muscles have come to adjust to the rifle’s weight, and although they make you feel like a geeky Civil War reenactor, you like the bayonets a lot. It’s a comfortable blend of your and Jade’s preferred weapons. And hey, if you can’t steady your aim enough to shoot down an underling, it’s not that hard to spear it between the eyes. Not that you really do that kiddie playtime shit anymore – underlings are predictable. If you want to be _really_ prepared for SBURB 2.0, you have to know how to fight a human. And so the cork bullets have become a necessity.

     The metal thumps an even rhythm on your skin. You use it to count the seconds – one thump, two thumps, three thumps – as you hike up the side of a LOFAF ravine.

     Walking home lets the rush and the excitement of battle dissipate from your pores, leaving you tired and complacent once again. A pseudo-meditative state. Jade’s feet disappear into the mud and weeds. The steel of her barrel glints with the white light that the forest allows to peek through. Four thumps, five thumps, six thumps.

     “You really are improving,” Jade says after a while. Her voice sounds labored from the effort it takes to maintain the upward climb. The end of her hair swishes to and fro. “Is your mind still set on swiping my strife specibus shtick?”

     “Dunno. Depends on how many slowpokes we got on the other side of that mountain. If the Big Bad ends up having a max turbo speed of 20 mph, maybe I can afford to stop and reload a few times.”

     “Do you feel any more prepared?”

     She glances back at you, and you give her an expression so blank that she turns to face the hillside again. There is no point explaining that you will never really be prepared. What sixteen-year-old is rearing and ready to plunge into certain death?

 

     The Land of Frost and Frogs is dimpled with deep and vivid underground pools, sharp plunges that could leave you falling for minutes before the light hits the water. It’s a spelunker-slash-sky-diver-slash-competitive-swimmer’s dream. Once you’re under the surface, it’s hard to tell whether the rushing in your ears is the sound of the water or the rivers of magma that flow below the rock and make it all steam up with heat. The perfect locale for a Sandals resort, if it weren’t for the safety hazard of Junior potentially falling into a volcano. Over the hill and on the rolling curvature of the planet’s surface, Jade begins to tug her shoes off. Floating yards behind her, she looks like a figure on a glossy postcard, the cloud of her hair perfectly matching the green-blue leaves of the rainforest. _Visit the wild woods of LOFAF today! Wish you were here!_

     The edge of the cavernous drop is soft with moss. Long tendrils of vegetation fall into where the earth has caved away, and far below is only the shimmering surface of a dark blue pool. Jade pulls her rifle off from where it’s slung over her back, dumping it in the tall grass with a soft thump. She grazes one toe over the deep, dark drop, takes a single step, and then she’s falling.

     You watch from above. Jade sails and sails downward, becoming smaller, and a hundred feet into her descent there’s a bright green flash of her clothes disappearing. The echo of her splash takes a while to reach you. The infinetisimal blip of her hair resurfaces in the water. You shed your own rifle to glide down into the pool. As soon as you’re under the surface, the sharp smell of clean water and the relief of the shade washes over you.

     A heavy beam of light shines down to illuminate the cave walls. Their crevices are filled with clusters of green, vines and blossoms growing with the barnacles and snails. Warmth reaches up and presses its hands against your stomach as you spiral further down. You reach out to trace the hot water with your long primaries and the talon tips of your hand.

     Jade is already sinking into the water, her body accustomed to the heat. Swirls of her hair float at the surface. You hold your breath and dunk yourself underwater.

     The glaze of digital coding over your eyes makes opening them painless. The water is murky – you can only just see the smudge of Jade’s legs drifting against the slimy rock. Some of your loose feathers come away and disappear. When you look down, you see that the bottom of the pool is littered with the remains of statuettes. A broken idol of Echidna has the tips of her quills broken, her face and spine overtaken with algae. Parts of her foreboding spikes have been replaced with green coral that grows in uneven spindles on her back. She looks like a sea slug.

     You pop your head above water. “Hey,” you gasp between breaths. “Archaeologist’s sweepstakes prize at six o’clock. Some straight aquarium advertisement footage down here.”

     “Yes, the consorts are fond of their carving,” Jade murmurs. Her eyes are closed, their lids slick with steam and sweat.

“You wanna try to carbon date this shit?”

     “Mm.” Jade exhales slowly and sinks further down, her breath blowing bubbles at the surface of the water.

     “Need to get a team of marine biologists in here. Get us some lawyers for the imminent lawsuit about disturbing a world heritage site.” Your tail twitches and snakes underwater, looking more seafoam green than orange. You feel like some sort of sea nymph rising out of the grotto. Like one of those Pre-Raphaelite babes from the books you’ve flipped through in Rose’s bookcase.

     Her mouth underwater, Jade simply nods her head.

     She isn’t paying attention to what you’re saying. Her eyebrows are raised in that relaxed curve that they ease into once she’s drifting into sleep. You’ll have to remember to ensure she doesn’t pass out – more than once, she’s hauled herself out of the pools with hands so pruney that they could be Nanna’s.

     You lower your face to mimic her and blow bubbles with your nose. The weight of your wings is heavy underwater; you try to stretch them out, but the pressure makes them cumbersome.

     “Sleepin’ furry says what.”

     No answer. Jade releases a quiet exhale and rests her head against her shoulder. _Bor_ -ing.

     Deep inside the planet’s crust, something rumbles. The tremor causes rocks to tumble off the sides of the cave, echoing against the stone as they fall. One does a somersault and lands with a plunk in the pool. The water temperature spikes, and you almost squawk when the heat ripples through your wings. Perhaps Echidna is rolling over in her sleep.

     When the heat fades and the hollow echoes sputter out, your eye follows a trail of swaying vines. Their leaves helicopter to the ground. You train your eyes on their ends, squinting hard at the shadows of the jagged rock, and bit by bit you start to see a sharply-cleaved tunnel into the surface of the wall.

     “Hey Jade,” you murmur. “Isn’t the first one to split from the group always the first one to eat it in the horror flicks.”

     “Dunno,” Jade sighs. She turns her face to rest on the other side of the rock. “Don’t wander off. Caves have lava.”

     “My planet is covered in lava.”

     “Mhm.”

     Your wings feel waterlogged when you pull yourself out of the pool. Water streams off of them, and you flap them outward to flick the droplets off. It’s a cool rush of air that makes your skin prickle when you sail upward into the draft. The vines yield to the beating of your wings, and you’re able to pull them back to see how far the tunnel goes. It’s not that far off the ground – the iguanas could mountain climb their way into it if they really wanted. Humid air pours out of it.

     “Hey, do you know Echidna’s dietary preferences,” you call back. “Is she prone to midnight snacking.”

     Jade ignores you. Or maybe she’s already asleep.

     (She’s probably already asleep.)

     You pull your wings against you back and invite yourself in.

 

     The inside of LOFAF’s crust smells like shifting coals, like something’s been dropped into the bottom of the grill and left to char. Brushing the walls with your palm, you feel that you are not the first visitor – the stone is littered with water-worn glyphs, crude geometric figures like the ones in G. Harley’s moleskins. Your talon traces the jagged lines of what must be a primordial Echidna, all curving lines and jutting spikes. The cult of the denizen.

     A rush of hot air blows past you and ruffles your feathers. At this rate, the water sticking to your skin is gonna get blow-dried right off of you.

     It gets darker. You blink hard to adjust to the light, or lack thereof – Start > General > Brightness and Vision > 90%. Now you can start to see where the tunnels splinter off, though the details are still fuzzy. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a consort by its toe. After some deliberation, you take the branch to the right. Not that you really have a choice – it’s the only one that can plausibly accommodate your wingspan.

     A drop of water falls from the tip of a stalactite and lands on your nose. You gasp in fear, and the sound of it reverberates. Stupid. If a naked mole rat underling crawls out of the ceiling and beats you bloody, it’ll be on you. That’s probably unlikely, though. Whatever settled in the niches of this cave was a lot more civilized than an underling – faint shadows light up the fading facial features of a humanoid statue, its expression simple and amphibian. Both of its hands have broken off, but in its folded arms it holds a bundle of its denizens quills. The rock above the figure has been chiseled away to form an alcove, and in the space hovering over it is the vigilant and wide-eyed face of Echidna. Little needles outline her jaw and form her eyebrows. You think maybe this is a carving of divine retribution, as though the denizen is about to rain fury down on the chump who thought they could get away with yoinking her quills.

     Drifting down the natural corridor, you find that this statue is not the only one of its kind, though it is one of the better preserved. Similar statues have crumbling faces, missing limbs and fabric folds so crusted with mineral that they’re hard to recognize. Faces of the planet’s denizen become fiercer, deeply-carved snarls and shining quills that disappear into the stalactites. It’s difficult to tell just what pushes you further into the belly of LOFAF. Maybe you’re fulfilling some sort of Indiana Jones fantasy, like you’ll discover the evolutionary link between iguana lineages in here and land yourself in a museum. But what probably drives you is the eerie similarity to your own planet – the radiating heat of the magma only meters away, the irritable growling of an unfathomable monster that can be heard even from the surface. Even outside of the game, your subconscious is dead-set on diving into danger’s way.

     This splinter of the labyrinth tapers off so abruptly that you almost fly into the wall. You’re presented with two more choices – left or right? This time, it really doesn’t matter. You can already tell that these tunnels will lead you into the same space, and you can tell because the same shafts of light are beaming out of both entries. The light at the end of the tunnel.

     If he hollers, let ‘im go, eenie meenie miney mo. You take the left passage and glide into another cave altogether.

 

     This place does not open into a vacation-worthy pool, although the light streaming in from the ceiling reflects water all the same. An old, eroded fountain has collected weeks of rainwater, briny and barnacled. Wilted petals of red blossoms meander across the surface. You drift around the fountain once, your palm skimming the rough and salted-over rim. The light that reaches the bottom of the cave frames the fountain’s figurehead in a soft halo, and it is her face that so wholly draws your attention. Staring down at you with open arms is the Witch of Space.

     Correction – whatever the iguanas’ idea of an immortal star goddess is. The Witch in this statue bears the spiral of Space on her robes, but she is anything but human. Her face is feminine but undeniably reptilian, the hood she wears protecting the finer details of scales that have been etched under her eyes. The look on her face is as soft as something made of stone can be – eyes cast down, she extends her hands outward as she gazes at the ring of needles surrounding her feet. It occurs to you that they are the quills of Echidna – having conquered the master of her land, the Witch offers mercy to the lowly inhabitants of the Land of Frost and Frogs.

     It’s a funny interpretation. You suppose the artist gets an A for creativity. Perhaps there was a crocodilian Knight deep in the crust of your own planet, all roughly hewn chainmail and armor carved to accommodate a ridged and spiky spine. The nakodiles never recognized you as their Knight of Time – you were too soft and fleshy and mammalian. Even so, you’ve lost your seat as an object of reverence. Hephaestus recognized you as a worthy player in his quest. His consorts, on the other hand, are considerably more finicky on who they deem a hero.

     In the Witch’s open palms are wilted leaves and petals that have drifted all the way down from the surface. You’re met with a strong blast of hot air from somewhere within Echidna’s lair, and the force of it empties her hands and makes them spiral to the surface of the fountain. You lean over the edge and watch them spin, spying your own reflection wobbling back at you. Your face still looks grimy. Testing the water with your hand, you feel that it isn’t very warm. It’s disconnected from the water table, fed wholly by the rain before the surging lava under the rock eventually evaporates it all.

     Fuck it. You jump in tail-first and splash your wings in the water, shaking them clean of their sweat and oil. The echoing of your wings hitting the water is loud, but no one is here to take a viral video of you. You plop your face against the water and scrub the dirt off with your rough palms.

     Holy shit, you completely understand the appeal of birdbaths now. Much better than the sauna Jade is busy pruning herself up in. Your face feels cool and clean when you take fresh breath. You peel a wet flower petal from your cheek and flick it out of the fountain, where it lands in the tall weeds that grow in the sunlight’s jurisdiction. Ah, did you say sunlight? Force of habit. You mean whatever light Jade happened to leave switched on inside her room. Always good to know that it’s enough to keep LOFAF’s ecosystem turning.

     You fold your arms on the edge of the fountain and rest your face on them. The whole thing hums with the water and magma rushing underneath you. It’s a deep and earthy sound, but the bass of it is outlined with the uneven and high-pitched tones of _something else_. It’s eerie and choral, almost avian, almost reptilian, almost human. The voice clicks and whispers and chirps inside the walls, and it stops at the same time that the walls tremble once again.

     Echidna is enduring a restless sleep, then. Just a little while longer, champ, and then you can hiss Byzantine eldritch riddles at anyone you want. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

 

     Just a little while longer. Your heartrate spikes, resisting the fire blanket of apathy you always try to dump all over it. Just a while longer. Three months and four days longer. What were you doing three months and four days ago? It feels like years ago. It feels like it just happened. Do you even remember what you did _yesterday_? The Sprite of Time has lost his bearings on the aspect.

     In three months and four days you will step off of the battleship and feel the solid earth underneath your tail and the heavy black of the Medium above you. No more van Gogh greens and yellows outside the portholes. Will you miss it at all? Will you be able to remember just how those digital pops of the Yellow Yard looked once you’re through the fenestrated window? Your camera was never able to do it justice.

     It will be impossible, you know, to describe these three years to anyone else. Like an out of body experience or the feeling of lucid dreaming, it’s unrepeatable and unable to be pigeonholed. You feel like your time between these two bookends of reality has been a fever dream, a long nightmare melting together until one day you woke up and the distress was gone. How tightly does the trauma have to clamp down on your neurons before it tricks you into the semblance of normalcy?

     Two years, eight months, and twenty-seven days, apparently. None of them could ever comprehend it.

     You try to conjure their faces in your mind – the _others_. Somehow, it’s easier to summon Rose’s face than your own. You wonder if you will even recognize Dave when you see him. He’s had three years to grow and change without the bird bits copy-pasted on, all fancy red fleece and sunglasses and sickly pallor from living in a horror movie meteor. You are unable to tell how your own appearance has changed, and you don’t think it’s because of the gradual shifting of time. Your face feels the same as it did when you leapt into the kernel. Only your wings have continued to grow. What if you look like completely different people? What if he’s sheared off his puff of hair and gotten way taller and learned how to wipe the unintentional snarl off his face? Well, at least no one would confuse the two of you.

     They must look the same as they do in your memory – your parents, you mean. You try to scale them down to size until they look like teenagers and not mysterious, towering shadows. The concept of them still terrifies you. They could be anything. They could be bitter or mean or awkward or pushy. They could not be expecting you at all, and then you’d just feel like party crashers. Somehow you doubt that this will be the case – no version of your mother seems like the type not to immediately adopt anyone bearing her likeness. It’s going to be a great big mess of family reunion out there, so much hugging and crying and bouncing up and down that no one will think to ask you how you’ve been or what you’ve been up to. What a horrible impression you’ll make once they know you let your best friend die.

     Just three months and four days longer. You are terrified and excited and drowning in nostalgia, and you do not know what it is that you want. Maybe to crash through the fourth wall at this very moment, maybe to fly as far away as possible, maybe to fling yourself into the lava. It’s as apparent as it’s ever been: you are not – perhaps will never be – ready for this battleship to land.

     Maybe once you exit the window frame, the session will recognize you as a foreign invader, a germ from an outside game threatening to poison the next. Maybe it’ll rip out your coding and hurl you into the Furthest Ring. Maybe nothing will happen at all until the session ends – if it ends? That’s right! It may never end! Yes, exactly – if the session is doomed after all, if it never ends, then you’ll never have to figure out what waits beyond the Ultimate Reward. You won’t have to spend a drop of sweat fretting over your fate. Sprites were never programmed to know shit about that. Why would it bother? Why would it bother to tell you anything when the Scratch is encroaching and the meteors are falling and Skaia is so very, very….

     Skaia was so very, very, blue. An enticing thing, a lantern for moths. What was it about that lovely entity that drew you to it so inexplicably? Was it the execution of a last-ditch code, a hidden line of script in your brain that made you doe-eyed and complicit and yielding to the planet that created you? Was it drawing you to its surface so that it could exterminate you with its celestial rain? Christ on the cross – were you _supposed_ to die back there?

     If this road trip had gone the way you wanted it to, if Prospit’s prince and princess were both alive and the yellow of the hull didn’t hurt so much to look at, if the session wasn’t doomed and you were all geared up to leap into a new amphibious universe, where would that leave you when the dust settles? You would have still asked Jade out. You would have _tried_ to get on with John, at least until it became a lost cause. If you became nestled into the fabric of their daily lives only to be unstitched by the nature of the game, how would that be fair to anybody? You could have stayed in the Incipisphere and spared everyone the trouble. Your memory would fade bit by bit until nothing was left to miss – ripping off the Band-Aid, so to speak.

     In hindsight, none of this really matters. The Heir is dead, and his session along with it. It doesn’t matter now that you let yourself get so close to the Witch, but how could you have known? If everything had worked out, if you left the window together only to be yanked apart by your own programming….

 

     Echidna clicks in her sleep, and the tremor of it makes you caw with fear. You run your talons through your hair and take even breaths, willing yourself not to give way to the same old panic. A horrible shadow seems to loom its heavy weight over you, an invisible, peripheral force that presses down on your back and makes you teem with nerves. You sink lower into the fountain, flip over so that your neck rests on the ledge, and squawk with fresh surprise when you make eye contact with the Witch of Space.

     Correction – whatever the iguanas’ idea of an immortal star goddess is. The Witch’s look is more severe than before, a shaft of light crossing her face to mar it with ominous shadow. Her arms of amnesty are now a challenge, an offer to clash arms. You swallow the lump in your throat and haul yourself out of the fountain.

     Both exits lead to the same tunnel – this you remember. You took the left, didn’t you? So you’ll do it again. Your dripping wings leave a trail of salty water behind you. The darkness swallows you, obscures everything in shades of brown and green. Twice your twice skims the slimy surface of a stalagmite, sending a shudder through your body. Shouldn’t be long until you reach the broken statues again.

     You exhale, and a cold cloud of air leaves your mouth. Wait – that doesn’t seem right. You watch your breath again, how it comes out like dragon’s puffs. Eyebrows furrowed, you stare up at the ceiling and see that long and jagged icicles are dripping above you. One of their tips snaps off and shatters on the ground when the entire tunnel quakes. From a fissure in the wall, rock splits apart and leaks a thin trickle of lava.

     Well, this is cool. You’ve gotten yourself lost. There are a couple options here. Turn yourself translucent and hope that you’re able to pass through magma unscathed, or keep going and find your way out somewhere else. Somehow, not subjecting yourself to brutal, fiery death seems preferable.

 

     There are no statues or glyphs or cave paintings here. It’s all too slick with frost, hard and unyielding to reptilian toes. Echidna sighs in her sleep, and a stream of lava hisses as it makes contact with a hard patch of ice. Steam rises from where they meet. At least the lava lights the way. Your tail flicks to avoid its heat. You keep scanning the walls, keeping your wings partway extended to feel for entries in the rock, but it only leads you further into the ice. Drops of fountain water freeze to your shoulders, and everything organic inside of you feels fit to frost over.

     Round the corner, the tunnel pushes you along into the snare of ice and rock. You snake through the cave, feeling your cells tremor each time the sleeping denizen whispers in the midst of her dreams. Her voice resonates in each of your cells, absolutely eerie in its unexplainable ferocity. You must be getting closer to her lair. Oh, _Jesus_ , what if you wake her up? There’s no time to entertain the fear of this at all, because when you turn out of the tunnel’s exit you’re confronted with the denizen herself.

     You’ve been spit out into a massive corridor of rock and ice, a moat of lava bubbling and gurgling all around you. Long segments of her cobalt tail twist and churn in it all, utterly unaffected. You cannot tell whether what’s in front of you is the cross-stitching of icicles that guard the entrance to her chamber, or the very quills that spike the length of her. It’s all an entanglement of sharp frost and spitting lava. Now is not the time to see how long you can last without dropping dead. Hephaestus was cartoonish in his might, like a poorly animated Grecian monster. Echidna is sleek and ferocious, and everything about her serpentine figure radiates _danger_.

     It takes a moment to fumble with your sylladex. Holding things manually has gotten to be a chore – Jade had to spend a couple hours reconfiguring one of her old sylladex menus to recognize you as its owner. It’s been a challenge to relearn its proper use. In the process of retrieving your phone, you almost launch a bag of chocolate chips you nicked from the kitchen and an empty CD case across the rock. You clasp your phone in your shaking hands and unlock it after three attempts.

 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 15:57 --

TG: so funny story  
TG: like a real knee slapper  
TG: would be smackin my kneecaps raw if i had any  
TG: there is at least a 3% chance i am lost  
TG: really lost  
TG: i got a creature from the nth dimension in front of me and im not too keen to figure out whatll hapen if i dont get the fuck out of dodge  
TG: *happen  
TG: …  
TG: nvm leave it like that  
TG: ………………………….  
TG: jade  
TG: dammit did you pass out again  
TG: you wanna have granny hands at this tender age  
TG: if i get outta here alive i better not find you floatin face down in the water like a goldfish  
TG: aint got toilets big enough to send you to the fish tank in the sky  
TG: jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaade  
TG: jade  
TG: does it mean anything to you that i am a babe in the woods liable to be snapped up by the untold horrors that lurk in this very crust  
TG: i am beautiful and charming and any underling would be delighted to have me for lunch  
TG: JADE  
GG: OMG!!!!!!!! relax i just fell asleep for a little while  
GG: no flushing necessary :P  
GG: youre not lost dave i can see you right now and you are like  
GG: five minutes away at MOST  
GG: do you need directions?  
TG: no i want the hell out of here  
GG: that is exactly what i just offered  
TG: then allow me to rephrase  
TG: i want the hell out of here six minutes ago  
GG: :/  
GG: siiiiign  
GG: ok i understand i will be there soon, no need to panic  
GG: can you wait a second so i can at least get dressed  
TG: sure  
TG: …  
TG: one second just passed  
GG: >://///////  
GG: omw

     There’s a crackle of light the same color as the text on your screen, and Jade materializes in front of you. She wrings out the ends of her wet hair, looking a little melted by the heat of the pools.

     “I see you’ve found Echidna,” she says. “Isn’t she something?”

     “Yeah, and she looks ready to wake the fuck up and defeather me alive.”

     Jade shakes her head and motions for you to follow. “Take it from me – she’s always a restless sleeper. The biggest risk being posed to you is the threat of bruising your tailbone on the ice. Follow me.”

 

     She leads you in the opposite direction, where the ice begins to melt and the streams of lava retreat to their origins inside the walls. As you get further up the slope, the frosty puffs of your breath return to normal, and the familiar croaking of frogs can be heard. You inhale a deep and pungent smell of rainforest and petrichor.

     “See?” Jade says. She folds her arms and stops at the mouth of the cave. “You weren’t far from the surface at all. You were barely even lost, really.”

     Right about now, Skaia should be setting across the sky. Cicadas and frogs fight for domination over the air, trying to drown each other out with their din. Jade stares out fondly over it all, twirling her hair between her thumb and index finger. She has such an affection for the land SBURB has given her. It’s the home her grandfather never allowed that Pacific island to become. Your heart aches as you look at her, and maybe it’s the pitiful sadness oozing off of you that causes Jade to catch you staring.

     “Everything is about to change for us, isn’t it?”

     She blinks slowly, and the amusement in her eyes sputters out. “Yes,” she whispers. “It is.”

     “I’m really scared.”

     “Me too.”

     You clear your throat and fidget with your claws. “Will you stay with me? When we land, I mean.”

     “Do you mean… like, in terms of personal proximity, or…?”

     You blush gold. “Well, yeah, I mean that. But also. What I mean is, like. Jade… when this whole nightmare is over, and we meet all those new people and we gotta get used to like, _interacting_ with ‘em again… we’ll still be dating, right? You won’t be afraid to tell people?”

     Jade tilts her head, her cheeks tinting darker. “I’m confused.”

     Your mouth twitches into a grimace before you can control your expression again. “God, I’m totally butchering this. What I _mean_ is… I’m afraid they’ll think that we just… that you only decided to because….”

     She looks down and sighs quietly, prying your hands apart to take one of them in hers. The shrieking of the cicadas reaches a fever pitch.

     “You must think I’m very superficial,” she says.

     You feel a pang of guilt.

     “I didn’t choose to be with you as a coping mechanism, or a crutch, and I certainly don’t plan on stamping us with an expiration date. You’re not a stand-in or a replacement for anything. You are exactly who you are, and no one else can claim that. No one else has lived what you’ve lived. This is what you come to understand when you’ve had the memories of another pressed into your head.” She taps her temple, a subtle reference to the sprite who gave her her ears. “And this is all coming from someone who was flirted with by no less than three trolls during the span of less than twenty-four hours! If I didn’t like you in the way you thought, you would’ve known. I’m not so cruel as to date someone for the hell of it.”

     “I… wait, what was that about trolls flirting with you?”

     Her eyes narrow. “Dave.”

     “Sorry.”

     This time, her sigh is one of understanding. Her thumb brushes the hard, avian plates over the top of your hand.

     “Out of all of us… you, me, Dave, Rose… you’re the only person who really understands how this has all affected me. You know more about me now than anyone else, even if I’ve been… admittedly, a little cagey. That isn’t going to just _stop_ mattering when we land. I thought that went without saying, but maybe I should have been more clear.”

     Jade pulls you closer to her, and you wrap your tail once around her legs. She digs her hands into the ruff around your neck. You try to bump foreheads, but she looks away at the icicles that are melting ‘round the entrance to the cave. Her face is dark with embarrassment.

     “What are you all red for,” you ask.

     Against your chest, you can feel her heart thumping. “This is really overdue,” she mumbles.

     “What.”

     Jade shudders, shaking out her shoulders as a visible squirm of nerves passes through her. You’re expecting her to tell you that she has twelve toes, or a secret doggy tail, or that she’s been pulling an Olson twins stunt on you for the past three years, so the anxious buzzing in your ears almost blots out what she says next.

     “I’m in love with you,” she says. She spits it out quickly, like saying something so sentimental will burn her tongue. “I don’t know what that means to you, or if you’ll even believe me, but it’s true. It’s _been_ true, and I won’t stop feeling that way just because we’re on the opposite side of a giant window.”

     Inside your head, you can hear the dial-up whirring.

     “Would you say something?” Jade mutters. Her fingers shake in your feathers. “You’re making me nervous.”

     You already know before you open your mouth that you’re going to stutter.

     “Of course I believe you,” you gasp. “I believe you.” You move your other hand to place it behind her ear. Her hair is still wet. “This probably isn’t a surprise at all, at least to me. I kind of always suspected that I’d feel this way eventually, like one of those universal inevitabilities. The game is full of them already. _God_ , this is corny.” You shake your head. “But if you didn’t already know, then I’m in love with you, Jade. Like, that’s just a fact. And I guess it terrifies me less to think about the new session if I know I can count on you to spear some motherfuckers with me.”

     Jade bursts into nervous laughter, her face still red. “I admire your enthusiasm.”

     Relieved that she hasn’t shoved your face into the lava for being a certified cornball, your tail impulsively wraps around her tighter and pulls her closer to you. Jade stands on her toes to reach your face and kiss you – was it the nerves that made you float so much higher above her? She tugs you back down to earth, cups your jaw with her soft palms. Your hands come to rest on her hips, and it’s while your talons are poking into her skin and her lips are flitting at the corner of your mouth that you notice she’s taller than you.

     Inside the planet, the tectonic plates are shifting. The Forge rumbles, and jittery as ever, a cloud of lavender hummingbirds come bursting out of the trees when the trunks of them are disturbed. They soar by the opening of the cave in a great swarm, impossibly fast little wings beating past your ears. You pull Jade flush against you, tasting the mineral saltiness that sticks to her lips, and it’s as though the hummingbirds don’t recognize you’re there. You’re surrounded by their flecks of purple, surrounded by the flutter of feathers and the beating of tiny hearts as they find another tree to call home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have to go outside now and eat rocks off the ground to recover from how physically painful it was to write the end of this


	49. Chapter 49

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 27 March, 2012

 

     The papers of this legal pad have gone soft from how much you’ve flipped through them. You thumb past them once again like some sort of flipbook, but instead of a jaunty stick figure animation, all you see are the blurs of crossed-out plans and bullet-pointed lists. On the last page to endure your scribbling, the pen has almost broken through to the other side.

     Davesprite exhales through his nostrils and leans the back of his head against the battleship’s railing. He’s making a valiant attempt at being as organized as you, but so far you’ve been dominating the pile of pens and highlighters. Figuring out the logistics of your landing procedure has not been his idea of a day well spent.

 

     “Okay, time to recap. We don’t know how dangerous the planet we land on will be – well, if we land on a planet at all. So as soon as we arrive, I’ll zap all the consorts to their respective lands to keep them safe.” You chew the cap of your pen. “Then we can figure out the most hospitable planet to touch down on. Somewhere the battleship will be left alone.”

     Davesprite looks down past the railing and into the splashes of green and gold. “Yup.”

     “Nanna will round up the Prospitians and Dersites beforehand. Hmm… and I guess the salamanders can stay with them, too.”

     This part of the plan has been the shakiest in the making. Nanna was more than happy to agree to take the reins, but the carapacians have had three years to figure out how awesome free will is. It might take a few practice runs to make sure they know what to do when the window breaks.

     “Yeah, and they’ll listen to her the most because they’ve been living on her food this whole time. She’s got ‘em whipped.”

     “Exactly. I’ll check and see if Prospit and Derse are safe for them in this session. If not, they’ll just have to hunker down in the boiler rooms until we can send them off.”

     “Right.”

     You drag your fingers through your bangs, tapping the end of a green highlighter against the legal pad. Stray papers litter the front of the deck, all the important notes written in your handwriting while Davesprite’s magical print decorates the margins. On top of a map you’ve drawn of the bedchambers, he’s left a ghostly doodle of a carapacian with an excessively large butt.

     “Gosh, I hope the moons didn’t get wrecked like in our session.” The thought of it makes you bite down on your thumbnail. You smell the smoke in your nose from the horrible fire, how chunks of your Kingdom of Light fell apart to be swallowed by its sun. You can’t bear to see it again.

     “Well, the rule of thumb for SBURB seems to be that if it can go wrong, it sure as fuck will.”

     You let out a deep sigh and rest your papers on your lap.

 

     The fourth wall is huge from where you sit. Its glass shimmers with the colors of the Yellow Yard, almost close enough to touch. It’s been impossible to ignore it.

     “It’s so close now,” you murmur.

     Davesprite follows your gaze and chews on the inside of his mouth. “Couldn’t you just… fly out and punch a hole through the glass? Couldn’t we expedite this a little?”

     “Wow, is this coming from the same guy who’s as terrified as I am?”

     He shrugs and turns his face away again, scowling at the pen in his hands. “I guess I’m just overthinking it.”

     “Assuming that we keep track of time the same way as they do on the meteor, then they’ll arrive on the same day. If we ignore that I can’t get there any faster on my own than on this ship… do you _really_ want to hang around the session waiting for them for seventeen days?”

     “I don’t know, maybe I’d have a chance to get to know my bro before he inevitably meets Dave and forgets I ever existed.” He picks at his teeth with one talon. “I dunno, maybe we could snatch my pendant from the bottom of the fucking ocean and hide in it like a couple of Pokémon until it’s time. Dramatic entry of the century. Come bustin’ out of it like babes out of an egregiously-sized cake.”

     Your mouth twitches. “Better idea. You could make friends with whatever sprites our guardians prototyped?”

     This draws a smirk out of him, and he laughs a little. “Oh hell yes, sprite party. Players not invited, it’s VIP.”

     “Hey!”

     “Don’t worry, former sprites can join on technicality. It’ll be the most exclusive club under the Green Sun. Our bouncer is an ogre and he smites all those who dare to crash the rave.”

     “Sounds wild.”

     “Happy hour starts as soon as those darn kids finish their planet quests.”

     Davesprite bites back a laugh and drags a blank paper towards him with the tip of his tail. He flicks it with his thumb and index finger, and a little glowing sailboat materializes.

     “Y’know, as much as the folks on the meteor have it like, ten times better than us, at least we settled for something better than a fucking lab out of a nineties cyberpunk horror movie.”

     You laugh and stretch your legs out in front of you. “I know, right? They’ll probably be so pale from lack of light. And they had to clean up all those _bodies_ , ugh….”

     Davesprite blinks in alarm. “Bodies?”

     “Yeah, Karkat was telling me how his friends totally broke down and started killing each other. It seemed like a real mess out there. He was sending me new ‘last words’ every ten minutes until he was sure no one was going to murder him. All these long apologies for his years of harassment… it was this weird blend of annoying and charming.”

     “Trolls will be trolls, I guess.”

     “So not only is it dark and musty, but they also had a bunch of corpses to clean up.”

     “We did, too.”

     A sharp pang leaves your chest as soon as it appears. “Yes, but it was made quick and easy by the virtue of my doggy powers.” You wiggle your fingers, and they spark with green.

     Davesprite rolls his shoulders back and gives a wry smile to the floor. “Maybe they’ll become sociopaths from hanging out with genocidal aliens. Then we’d be the normal ones.”

     “Wouldn’t that be perfect payback?”

     “‘Don’t get us wrong, we are _miserable_. But sucks to suck, we got four planets and a ship to hang out on. Oh, and also we didn’t get stuck with aliens. Little, fuckin’… bug-eyed gremlins whose idea of a good time is jackin’ it into buckets and sniffing each other’s spit.’”

     “The chess folk are _sort_ of aliens.”

     “Okay, yeah, but they’re cute and mostly harmless. Most of them can’t even talk.”

     “That’s true.”

     “We’re like free range chickens.”

     You burst out laughing. “ _What_?”

     “We are free range fucking chickens. We get to run around in the fields and shit, and they’re the sad ones you see in cages from those documentaries about why you should be vegan. Sarah McLachlan singing their many woes. Basically, we lay the better eggs.”

     “Not even you lay eggs.”

     “I have my secrets.”

     “Sure you do.”

     Davesprite starts to fold his page into origami, then he seems to realize halfway through that he doesn’t know how. He folds it into as small a square as it’ll go and flicks it across the deck.

     “We’ve got to put these last couple weeks to good use.”

     “How?”

     “How else. We need to come up with as many sick burns to hit ‘em with when they show up. Really knock ‘em off their feet. ‘Nice place you got there, did Stephen King pick it out for you?’ No, that’s lame. Uh… I’ll come up with a better one.”

     “I am certain you will. It’ll really soften them up when we tell them….”

     “…What happened. Yeah.”

     “Yeah.”

     You shove the legal pad off your lap and lie down on the floor of the hull, feeling the cool gold against your cheek. Everything turns sideways. Davesprite’s orange tail twitches across your line of sight.

     “Maybe we should also practice how we’re going to explain that one.”

     Though you don’t look him in the face, you can feel Davesprite looking at you.

     “We’ll figure it out,” he says in a low voice. “We will.”

     You close your eyes and trace the dings in the metal with your fingers. “I hope so.”

 


	50. Chapter 50

PRNS _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 11 April, 2012

 

     “I can’t _believe_ we never figured out how we’re going to tell them! How can we _not_ know?”

     Jade circles ceaselessly about the room – she’s been doing it for so many hours now that the path of her footsteps should be printed into the plates of the floor. She chokes back a dry sob and wrings the end of her hair in her hands. You watch from the end of the bed, too tired to even blink. Neither of you have slept in what feels like days.

     “They probably have all _sorts_ of things planned out to say to us, and we’re just going to be stammering like _idiots_!” Her voice cracks, exaggerating her unusual feral child accent. “‘Oh, you were expecting John? Funny story about that!’”

     She stops in the middle of the floor, puts her face in her hands and rubs her eyes like she’s trying to scrub them free of something.

     “What the _fuck_ are we going to do?” she sobs.

 

     Your ribs ache from keeping your panic packed tightly inside of yourself. It leaks out of you in the slight tremble that lives in your fingers, but otherwise the crushing fear is combusting internally. You don’t want to make Jade feel worse. So, instead, you keep yourself as still as possible.

     Her feelings are easy to understand, but this is not the reason why you’re swallowing your terror whole. Mostly, it’s because the panic that comes off of her in waves paralyzes you with its secondhand might. Maybe her First Guardian powers are lashing out like solar flares to short-circuit everything in their path. Maybe you can’t move because you really _can’t_.

 

     Jade takes a few long strides to the door, then turns on her heel and bites down hard on one of her knuckles. Her other hand wraps around her stomach to claw at the folds in her shirt. She rocks in place for a few seconds, deliberating on where to continue her breakdown. Then she paces to the porthole, looks out over the Yellow Yard, and turns her back to the wall again.

     “ _Fuck_ ,” she hisses. “It really is too late, isn’t it. There’s no time left.”

     Jade slumps to sit on the floor, drawing herself inward until her face is between her knees.

     “Maybe we _should_ just leave.” Her voice is near a whisper. “They’ll never know we were even here. I can leave the ship somewhere safe… no one would find it. We can drift through the Furthest Ring until the timeline sputters out, and then we’d just disappear. As far as they know, we just never showed up.”

     A ripple passes through you, a punch of revulsion like stumbling across a spider in your closet. You lurch from the spot you were certain you were glued to, and before you know it you’re yanking Jade upright until she’s standing straight. She yelps in surprise, and you take her shoulders in your hands. A sternness comes over you that you have never felt until now.

     “Listen to me, Jade, because I won’t say this again. We’ve gone too far now to back down. We can’t get cold feet. We can’t be chickenshits. We need to be honest with them. No beating around the bushes, no excuses, no bullshit. We need to _tell_ them, and tell them right away.”

     Jade avoids your stare, parts of her gleaming with static shock as she resists the instinct to teleport out of your grasp. You realize you’re holding her too tight and loosen the grip of your fingers.

     “John is _dead_!” you rasp. “He is _dead_ , and we have lived with that for three years. His ghost has followed us no matter where the fuck we go or what the fuck we do, and there will never be a single moment that we don’t feel like giving up because he isn’t here. Because we failed him as his friends.”

     Somehow, both of you know that you aren’t speaking directly to Jade anymore. You swallow the rock in your throat before you can continue.

     “John is _dead_ , and we are miserable, and confused, and alone. And if you want to hate us and place the blame on our heads, if that’ll make it easier for you, then so be it. You can’t make it any worse.”

     There’s a weakening between your hands as Jade’s muscles release their tension. Jade cries bitter tears, her mouth set in a painful grimace, and your hands immediately fly from her shoulders.

     “Jade,” you whisper. “You understand, right? You understand why we can’t do this?”

     She sinks her face into her hands once more, nodding piteously. Her knees look ready to buckle, and with a little bit of effort you’re able to scoop her up. She’s lighter than you remember. You can tell it embarrasses her to be treated like this. Jades toes curl as you try to place her back into bed, throwing the yellow sheets over her shivering body.

     “You can’t park a battleship on no sleep,” you mutter. “Put it out of your mind for tonight.”

     She wipes her red eyes under her glasses, her cheeks shining with the tears that haven’t dried yet. You try to remember the last time you’ve seen her sleep, but can’t come up with anything more recent than three days ago. Her fingers spasm with exhaustion. Lying down, though, seems to make the weariness of the past few days crash down on her – it’s already hard for her to keep her eyes open.

     “There must be something wrong with me,” she whispers. “I always thought that I’d never give up even when I’m miserable, even when things are difficult, but it’s not true. It happened to me when I was Jadesprite. It’s happening again now. Even when my friends need me the most, I become completely useless.”

     You lie down beside her and hold her to your chest. It’s not hard to feel how her silent crying makes her body tremble. It takes the breath out of her. You run your fingers through her hair.

     “If you’re useless,” you murmur, “then I’m less than the scum at the bottom of a dirty-ass fish tank. You’ve propelled this ship at the fucking speed of light without a break for three years. You’ve put on a brave face almost every single day when anyone else would’ve hung up the towel. You’ve tolerated _my_ dumb ass. You’ve helped me more than you know. You’ve survived. That counts for something.”

     Jade’s fingers unfurl, and she uses them to hug you close. You bury your nose in her hair.

     “I don’t know what I’d be like if I had lost you, too,” she says. Her voice is hard to hear.

     For a while, she doesn’t say anything. Her breath evens out, and when you’re certain she must be asleep, you plant a kiss on the top of her forehead. Then her legs twitch under the sheets, and she speaks again.

     “Thank you for existing.”

     You release a small puff of a sigh, then fold your right wing over her. She curls up to fit into its curvature.

     “You’re welcome. Now go to sleep.”

 


	51. Chapter 51

Prospitian Royal Navy Ship _Basilica_. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 April, 2012

 

     The fourth wall is massive, and gleaming, and very, very close.

     Your nails dig into Davesprite’s knuckles, cancelling out the pain from how sharply his talon tips poke into the top of your hand. His other claws burrow into the upholstery of the chair he’s sitting in. Next to him, you keep discovering that your foot has taken on a life of its own. It thuds against the damask carpet, your ruby slippers clicking against thinly covered bronze. It’s the only sound left in the control deck – the rumbling of the ship’s mechanical insides have died now that you’ve shut down all of its internal organs. The boilers are cool and still within the bottom of the hull.

     “Two millimeters from contact,” you rasp. Your heart beats hummingbird-quick in your throat, pressing down on your lungs and making the words hard to form. Squeezing the syllables out is an effort.

     “What is that in time.”

     You tug at the gray fleece of your godhood that overheats your neck. “Don’t know.”

     Your god tier costume feels like exactly that – a Halloween-quality disaster. It’s shrunk since you last put it on – you had to adjust the waistline and pull out the sleeves with your Green Sun tailoring. If you had kept it on all these years, it probably would have grown alongside you. Regardless, it still feels restrictive and ridiculous, like a flashy cheerleading outfit. You want desperately to change into normal clothes, but this is not what your friends will be expecting. They want the Witch of Space, and dammit, if you can deliver at least _one_ of the things they expect, then they will get it.

 

     Out in the main corridors, you can hear Nanna barking into a megaphone. She alchemized it a few days ago, kept it sitting on her bedroom desk for “the Big Day,” as she called it. Right now, she’s using it to herd the carapacians into position.

     “Three in a row, three in a row!” you hear her distantly calling. There’s a rhythmic procession of clunking chess feet outside, a river of pushing, shoving bodies making its way out of its new home. “You, right there! Yes, _you_! Grab a buddy – no one is leaving this ship by their lonesome if I can help it! We’re sticking to the buddy system, folks!”

     “Your mom’s doin’ a nice job out there,” says Davesprite. His voice sounds dry, and he stares ahead unblinkingly at the fenestrated window.

     “I wish we could help. I feel like we’re not doing anything.”

     “You’re already helping,” he argues. “ _I’m_ not doing shit, but you’re doing the most important job by getting us the hell out of here.”

     There’s a burning in the back of your mouth. “I don’t know whether that’s a good thing.”

     “Of course it is.”

     “This is happening so fast,” you whisper. You feel the tears well. They’re the variety that stings the most – the tears of panic. Your next words would be _I’m not sure if I’m ready_ , but there’s no point in expressing that now. The fourth wall doesn’t care if you’re not ready, and neither do the people waiting for you on the other side.

     It would help if you had a precise countdown, but nothing of that nature can be calculated. First impact could occur at any moment, and the terrible _waiting_ makes your muscles tense up with false alarm every few seconds. You push against the back of the battleship with every drop of strength you have, and yet it remains tantalizingly separate from its target. The golden tip of the hull is reflected clearly against the bottom-left frame of glass, and despite all your straining, you still cannot see past the surface.

     “Let’s keep it moving, people!” comes Nanna’s muffled voice. The megaphone crackles with feedback. “Hey, don’t you think for a second I didn’t see that, mister! No cutting in line, we’re all going the same place!”

     Davesprite squeezes your hand absentmindedly. You’re so focused on pouring your powers into these final moments of piloting that you don’t even feel it. “Hey,” he starts. “Do you think that the new session wi— _shit_!”

     The deck is rocked by a jarring tremble. It’s finally happening – one thousand and ninety five days later.

 

     Outside, the parade of carapacians goes up in a chaos of startled cries. There’s the reverberation of them losing their footing, shelled exoskeletons bumping against metal. Davesprite’s feathers are puffed up ‘round his jaw.

     “Was that it?” he stutters. “Is that supposed to be happening?”

     “Yes,” you snip. “Get ready.”

     The hull grinds against the surface of the glass. Spiderwebs of fine cracks spread across the surface, reflecting distorted pops of gold and green. Then it all reaches a crescendo in a sickening crunch, and shards of the window start to shatter and cave in. The battleship has begun its grand escape.

     “Here it comes.”

           

     It all comes crashing down on you at once – the weight of the Sun that has been curtained away from you for so long. It’s an infinite boundlessness that fills your cells and crackles citrus-yellow around your fingertips. Everything is within your reach, and nothing is outside of your domain. For a fleeting second, you feel disconnected from all else in the room. You lift your shaking hand and press your fingers into a fist, and with a final shove the battleship crashes through the glass.

 

     When you emerge on the other side, gravity delivers a swift punch to your stomach. All at once, the pile of notebooks and papers resting on the front of the cockpit slide off and fall to thud against the door. The ship groans as its mechanical parts are rotated ninety degrees. Motion sickness clouds your senses, and you can hear the shuffling and screaming as the carapacians fall backward against the end of the corridor. Nanna has ditched the megaphone, or maybe she dropped it – her shouts for the chess folk to stay calm are at her normal volume.

     Davesprite’s claws dig into your skin, the weight of your ascent pressing him down into the back of his chair.

     “This doesn’t seem normal!” he shouts.

     “It’s not. Hold on!”

     You let go of Davesprite’s hand to lift your palms above your head, and the battleship resumes its horizontal flight. The kickback of physics nearly makes you ill as the battleship is severed into a fraction of its original speed. Everything shifts back into place with a loud, metallic protestation.

     Davesprite hugs his chest, straining to look out of the control deck’s windows.

     “Looks like a planet,” he observes in a strained whisper. “This place is _massive_.”

     “No it isn’t – we’re just tiny.” You glance behind you, sparing a peep at the window you’ve just left behind. “That portal was a lot smaller than we thought it was. There’s a chance we were shrunken down those entire three years.”

     He runs his claws through his feathers. “That’s fucked.”

     “I just need to size us up.”

     Davesprite braces himself for the discomfort of resizing, and every tiny square millimeter of the ship leaks into your vision. You see everything at once in a blinding overlay of chartreuse, see everything as a perfect and interconnected ratio. Doing the math is a quick job – if the window in the grass is four by six centimeters, and the window you broke through was four hundred by six hundred meters, that’s approximately….

     In the next nanosecond you scale it all up a hundred times over. Now, the battleship is at its proper grandeur.

     Beside you, Davesprite squirms with the uncanny feeling of having his molecules rewritten. He pushes himself out of his chair and drifts to the glass, pressing his hands against it like a child at the zoo.

     “So, is this the Land of Grass and Stonehenge Knockoffs? Looks like the goddamn Scottish moors out there.”

     Your legs nearly buckle when you try to stand. It takes considerable focus to walk to the front of the deck, resting your hands on the dials and switches for support. Delivered into the next world, you’ve forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other.

     The planet outside the glass is hilly, a thousand shades of green coalescing into a spectacular collage of ancient agricultural terraces. Erase the time-worn, ruby-red stones burrowed into the earth, and this place could almost pass for your Pacific island. A ribbon of nostalgia passes through you.

     “There _are_ a lot of henges,” you say.

     In your distraction, the ship has slowed to a crawl. A series of groans continues out in the hall as the chess folk pull each other upright. A herd of nakodiles bustles past the door, clacking their teeth together and shaking out the kinks in their tails from bouncing around the hull.

     “Let’s give the ship a rest, shall we?” you murmur, mostly to yourself. You splay your fingers and lower your hands, and the battleship begins its steady drop into a dip in the hills. A hollow echo that travels up to the cockpit tells you that you’ve made contact.

 

     You’ve landed. You’re here. You shut your eyes, and you have scarcely a moment to let the reality set in before the door opens and Nanna pops her head inside.

     “Are we all set to go, Jade?” she asks. Her hair is askew, and she repositions her glasses on her nose.

     “Yes, I think so,” you answer. “Is everyone okay?”

     “Maybe a couple of dinged noggins!” Nanna hoots. “But yes, everyone’s rearing and ready to step foot into the next great adventure! Is the signal still the same?”

     “Same as ever, Mom.” You fidget with your bell sleeves. “Keep them calm, and we’ll give you a call as soon as everything’s prepared.”

     “Sounds good to me! Oh, and I almost forgot….”

     Nanna takes her hand off the door and floats into the control deck, and you yelp with surprise when she yanks the two of you into a hug.

     “H–hey!” Davesprite complains. His arms are stiff. “At least gimme time to get all sentimental first!”

     “I’m so sorry, dears,” Nanna says. Your mother rests her cheek on the top of your head, and when you realize that her sniffing means that she’s on the edge of crying, you wind your arms around her. She smells like incense and the crocheted quilts on her bed. “I hope you can forgive me. This whole scene has just struck me syrupy! Three years have flown by so quickly… why, I remember when you were just twiggy little children hopping around the ship, all excited from playing this grand old game. Goodness, how young it made me feel to be keeping you kids in line!”

     She pats the back of your hair, and you feel the metal of her sprite pendant pressing into your chest.

     “And now look at you… you’ve both grown so much!” Her voice goes quiet and saccharine. “I’m so proud of you. You’ve both done such a marvelous job.”

     “Job of what?” Davesprite asks.

     Nanna pulls away and tucks your hair behind your ear, giving you both a coy smile. “Well,” she sighs, ignoring the question altogether. “I’ve got a parade to wrangle – go on now, and I’ll wait here for the signal. Do your best out there.”

     Something stings behind your eyes, and before you know what you’re doing, you leap forward to give Nanna another hug. Your hands cling to the soft fabric of her collar, and she exhales quietly next to your ears.

     “Thank you, Mom,” you whisper. “Thank you so much. For everything.”

     “Now, now,” she hums. Her ghost hand rearranges your hair to neatly frame your face – a habit she’s always indulging in. “I should be the one thanking _you_ for your wonderful company all these years. I can’t tell you how much I’ve treasured our time together. You really are something, did you know that?”

     She grazes her thumb across your cheek, and then she’s turning to leave. Her absence leaves a cold draft in its place.

     “Nanna!” Jaspers pokes his head in and snakes along the floor, a long pink trail of neon and pinstripes. His fur stands on end, making him resemble a lion. “There you are! There’s _so_ many people out there! I got my ears turned inside-out!”

     “Ah yes, there certainly are.” Nanna bends down to scratch behind Jaspers’ ears. “Be patient a little longer, kitty – we’ll be seeing people very soon who you will no doubt be quite pleased to meet.”

     Jaspers does a backflip in midair, but somehow his princess hat stays fixed to his head. “I know! Purr purr purr….” He winds twice around your ankles, and you tense up at the brushing of his tentacles. “I’m gonna see Rose soon! I’m so excited! I missed her so much!”

     The purrs radiate off of him. He rubs at your hems, and you stroke the soft fur under his chin. His whole face trembles with joy, his eldritch whiskers twitching forward.

     “Rose will be very happy to see you,” you murmur. It eases your nerves a little to feel the silkiness of his pink cheek fluff. “But you have to stay with Nanna so you don’t wander off. It’s important that we don’t get split up.”

     “That’s right! You’re sticking with me, Mister Whiskers.” Nanna snaps her fingers, and Jaspers drifts over to bunt his face against her shoulder. The overlay of their tails is a soft lavender. “Well, don’t let a little old lady and a silly cat get in your way, now,” she says. “Go complete your cosmic quest – I believe in you!”

     And then the glowing trails of their tails disappear, and the door is closed.

     You stand still and rub your fist under your eyes, and it’s a while before you feel Davesprite’s hand on your shoulder.

     “You ready?” he asks quietly.

     The game is waiting, and so are your friends. You nod your head.

 

     There’s a hatch in the ceiling that opens with a rusty groan and drops open to reveal the air outside. Humid air pours in, and you float up to stick your head out. No longer is the air electric with the void – this is the Incipisphere, all gravity and oxygen. You had forgotten how black the sky is out here. A universal constant.

     Davesprite grunts to force his folded wings out of the hatch, panting as he scrambles onto the main deck. Your field of vision is swallowed in emerald – it’s a deep and beautiful hue, a shade so divine you feel you could live in it. Its sky is sparse and deep in its pigment, and you hold out your hands to blip the planets of your session into your palms. They follow your fall as you leap from the edge of the deck, your feet landing with a thud in the soft, tall grass. The feeling of it under your shoes makes you want to cry – when’s the last time you felt grass that was _just_ like this?

     “The solar system’s about to get a little complicated,” you murmur to yourself. “Time to join your friends.”

     With a tremendous sound like a lightning storm, the lands of your friends snap into the blank spaces of the Medium. They’re amazing from this distance – the blue oceans of LOFAF shimmers, the iridescent pastels of LOLAR gleam and shine, and the deep red of LOHAC’s lava glows starkly against the black. Returned to its formal glory, the battlefield takes its position at the center of the circus. You feel you’re at the epicenter of a model universe, perfect in every rotation. And you also feel very, very small.

     “Time to shoo out the varmints,” Davesprite says. “You got a big enough broom?”

     “Yup, I’ve got a broom as big as the sun.”

     You close your eyes and pinpoint every last consort in the ship, all those scattered clusters of salamanders and nakodiles and turtles and iguanas. They disappear in the same instant – startled carapacians blink bewildered at the spaces where the reptiles used to be, and great groups of unorganized animals tear off in different directions on their homeworlds. On LOLAR, little pink shells disappear into the water as the consorts dive for what they perceive as safety. Only the salamanders stay behind, they slimy skins camouflaged in the golden halls.

     “…And there they go. That’s it for now.” You brush your hands against each other as if to rid them of dust.

     Davesprite picks at his talons. “Um. So, is the meteor here yet?”

     You squint at the depthless black, scanning the edges of the Veil for any signs of newcomers. The meteors that scatter across the outer wastes are all still, quietly held aloft by the Medium’s paradoxical gravity.

     “I don’t see them,” you respond, still looking up into the sky. “They can’t be too far behind. I’ll keep an eye out.”

     He looks deflated, and some of his feathers settle. “Oh. Okay.”

     “They’ll be here soon.”

     “I know. It’s just. I don’t know.”

     You don’t know, either. What words could ever be applied to the atrocious anticipation roiling away in your gut? You feel both relieved and disappointed. You still have time to muster the courage to face them, but at the same time, you really wanted to get it over with. It’s a prolonged torture to wait for their arrival.

     Davesprite clears his throat. “How’re Derse and Prospit lookin’.”

     “Oh my _gosh_ , that should’ve been my first priority!” You smack the bottom of your palm against your forehead. Your more-than-gently-used battlefield almost hides the Kingdom of Light in its mist, but you zoom in to see it clearly. What you see makes you clasp your hands to your mouth.

     “ _No_ ,” you whisper through your fingers. “Not _again_!”

     Davesprite’s eyebrows raise, offering a cautious hand until you shrink away.

     “What? What’s wrong with them?”

     “The moon has exploded,” you respond past the tremors. “Oh my _god_ , Dave, _look_ at it.” You point your finger to what can be seen of Prospit past the battlefield’s curvature. “It’s been hollowed out, you can see the _insides_ , oh my _god_ …”

     Davesprite stares at the fractured moon, horrified. Broken pieces of it are suspended in its orbit, revealing the hollow, pumpkin-orange interior. It smelled like brimstone as you fell into Skaia’s atmosphere, shards of glass and chunks of brick sailing past your head. He stayed out of grasp all the while, the fire burning in your ears.

     When you were smaller, Prospit was an entity. It was an idea, a foundation, something both immaterial and impossibly concrete. More than anything, it was indestructible. Something about all those tightly compacted cathedral towers and looping bridges made it seem armored as a hunkered armadillo, able to face any attack. And under the Skaialight, who would dare deface it?

     How fragile it all looks from out here. Destroyed once, destroyed twice – in the end, the Kingdom is as indestructible as a model in a snow globe. Cheaply gilded and easy to break. You feel ill.

     “Jesus _Christ_ , Jade, I’m so fucking sorry.” Davesprite turns back, and the look on his face startles you. “I… I don’t mean to change the subject or anything, but… what happened to Derse? Is it still all right?”

     At the edge of the session, the Kingdom of Darkness is drifting in ruins. The surface of it has been peeled away, chunks of violet brick littering the black. You squeeze your eyes shut and shake your head. A quiet gasp of grief escapes him, and he clenches and unclenches his fists.

     “How did this happen? How could everything already be so _completely_ fucking pear-shaped?”

     “I don’t know,” you whisper. “I don’t know, whatever blew them up has already fled the scene. But we can’t send the carapacians back there – there’s no way in hell I’m letting them leave that ship. Something or someone out there has it out for them. I can’t put them in harm’s way.”

     Frustrated, Davesprite’s mouth pulls itself into a sneer. He gives a hard stare to the planets that revolve around this one.

     “ _Fuck_.” This particular word comes from him so often that you don’t bother asking for context. “Well, you better call your mom. Tell her to sit tight with the tykes while we get to the bottom of this goddamn mystery.”

 

     You fumble with your phone, which almost tumbles out of your sylladex and into the grass. Your stomach still turning, you slide-to-unlock it and search for Nanna’s number. She refused to get herself a phone until these final few days – after hours of tinkering, you were able to alchemize one whose touch screen would respond to the temperature of her fingers.

     The ringtone drones on and on. She doesn’t pick up the first time – maybe she got distracted by a carapacian crisis, or perhaps she just forgot how to answer a phonecall with this new-fangled technology. You peel the phone away from your ear and look up at the revolving planets, sighing as you prepare to try again.

     Davesprite has begun to distract himself. He drifts around with his fists on his hips, giving cock-eyed looks at each of the lands.

     “I wonder which one of these planets is my bro’s,” he wonders aloud. “Definitely not _this_ one – too chill. I get he’s not the same person and stuff, but no iteration of this guy is gonna be fuckin’ Braveheart.”

     Absentmindedly, you comb the planets to find an answer to this question as well. A planet in your periphery is iridescent with crackling bolts of lightning – neon? Probably belonging to Rose’s mom. You don’t think anyone else’s land would compete with LOLAR for such a spectacular display.

     There’s another planet beside it. Odd – the spacing of this session is off. Why is it angled so closely to its neighbor?

     “Dave…?”

     Davesprite is still contemplating the new domain. “Maybe that one,” he says, jabbing a talon at a planet smoking green and gray. “It looks hellish enough.”

     What a strange land. What a very, very _blue_ planet. It’s an incredible, vivid shade of cobalt. Something about it strikes you as terribly familiar. Whose planet could this be? Who could _possibly_ ….

 

     “Dave.”

     “Or maybe this planet _could_ be his? I mean, like, the barren expanse could be a metaphor for an emotional void or something… and maybe the rocks and henges and shit are like a symbol of a hard social exterior? Man, I’m just makin’ this shit up. Don’t listen to me.”

     A coldness seizes you, and the breath is hard to summon. The blue planet is sprouting with brilliant turquoise trees, dried riverbeds where splotches of black oil still mar the flat stones. A sleeping serpent by a familiar name has given up his roost in the center of the planet, and far above the surface, there is a towering expanse of white walls and windows. Your phone is forgotten in the grass.

     Davesprite turns around and gives you a curious look, suddenly aware that you’ve been ignoring his rambling. His gaze follows yours.

     “What? What’s the deal with that one?” He flicks his talons. “Looks like the planet of the Smurfs.”

     “Dave.”

     “What.”

     “We aren’t doomed.”

     Pause.

     “ _What_?”

     You lift one finger, the muscles feeling invisible and numb. The blood in your veins seems congealed.

     “How many planets do you see, _including_ this one?”

     He turns in a full circle, his talon counting each land.

     “Uh… seven.”

     “Right. Seven. Which leaves out the planet that you _can’t_ see because the battlefield is obscuring it.”

     “So….”

     Your face is hot. “So, there are eight planets. _One_ of them didn’t travel with us. _One_ of them wasn’t created in the Medium.”

     Davesprite blinks. “Is this a five-player session?”

     “No.”

     You stare up at that blue rock in the sky, not looking at each other, not touching each other, not even breathing, and an inestimable rift of grief and joy opens up inside your chest. You can see that tower from where you stand, you can see the familiar bedroom inside of it. You can see where the couch has been teleported away, the missing lamp and the missing photos and the missing harlequin. You can see John Egbert’s house.

     “That planet….” you whisper. “That planet is the Land of Wind and Shade.”

 

     Your name is Jade Harley. Three years ago, you became one of the most powerful beings that ever has or will exist. And two years and three hundred sixty-four days ago, you lost your brother forever. Well, not really, but almost. At the moment, it's more as though he’s resurrected in the most improbable and fairytale of scenarios. You have your best friend with you (your best  _best_  friend having been swallowed in fire and smoke), eight planets to drain of their grist, and what feels like too little time to do anything. There are a lot of words you could use to describe how you feel in this moment. Among them would be “surprised,” “disbelieving,” “confused,” and “absolutely heartbroken.”

     Your name is Jade Harley, and you have had three years to rethink life without your brother. You have sunken into the crags of what is surely a doomed timeline, willed yourself to become small and insignificant in its web. You have held yourself and the battleship aloft to allow for the continued existence of hundreds of lives, and for a brief and shining moment, you feel the warmth of knowing you made the right decision. Nothing about these three years has made any sense. Nothing had gone according to plan, and despite the shining blue planet in the sky, you know it will take more than reunion to recover. There are questions to ask, and shoulders to punch, and tears to shed. There will be your arms around his neck, there will be group hugs on the concrete that was once his driveway, and there will be a long, long talk to be had. Nothing makes any sense, and the mourning that continues to pour out of you is the sadness of knowing this is not your John. Perhaps his memories of you are distorted – perhaps in his long storyline of events, you have slipped from his fingers as well. This is not your John. Your John is dead, and he always will be. But this John is your brother, and you are his sister, and you have no complaints to make about that. You will be okay. Everything will be okay. Your brother of Breath will reunite with his Blood.

     Your name is Jade Harley, and you are ready to try again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its been an adventure. phew! thanks for reading, my dudes.
> 
> "isnt she gonna go grimbark soon? doesnt she have to help jane and jake?"  
> hey buddy.... dont worry about it


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